ENGL 217/LIT 231
Prof. G. Steinberg
To get a handle on the Odyssey, Oresteia, or Aeneid, you may need a little background about the Trojan war. So, let me give you a potted summary of the story:
The story of the Trojan war is very complicated, but in essence, it all began because Helen, the wife of Menelaus of Sparta (also sometimes spelled Meneláos) and the most beautiful woman on earth, ran away with Paris of Troy. Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon gathered an army of Greek heroes to go to Troy to get Helen back. Odysseus was one of those heroes (from the Greek island of Ithaca). Odysseus didn’t want to go to Troy (and even tried to trick people into believing he was insane to avoid going), but in the end, he went and became one of the greatest heroes of the war. The absolute greatest hero of the war was Achilles (also spelled Akhilleus), who shows up briefly in Book XI of the Odyssey. Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus, was also an important hero and was made chief commander of all the Greek armies.
After ten long years of besieging the city of Troy, the Greeks were about to give up, when Odysseus came up with a brilliant plan to defeat the city. The Greek heroes built a hollow wooden horse, hid inside, and pretended to leave it behind as if they had abandoned the fight and gone home. When the Trojans took the horse into their city (thinking that the Greeks were long gone), the Greeks inside the horse waited until night, then jumped out, and opened the city gates from inside to let in the entire Greek army. The Greeks thus conquered the city and burned it to the ground, killing all the Trojan men and leading off all the Trojan women as slaves.
When the Greeks left Troy, however, they ran into trouble. Each hero set off with his own fleet of ships, and they quickly got separated and lost. (Navigation in ancient Greece wasn’t all that accurate, and people got lost at sea all the time.) Menelaus will tell us about his adventures getting home to Sparta in Book IV of the Odyssey. Agamemnon got home to Argos safely only to be murdered by his own wife in his own house. She had waited anxiously for his return from the war in order to kill him and marry her long-time lover Aegisthus (also spelled Aigisthos), who was later killed by Agamemnon’s son Orestes.
Of all the heroes, Odysseus took longest getting home to Ithaca. When the Odyssey opens, Odysseus has been gone for twenty years (the ten years of the war, plus ten years more). Telemachus, the son he left behind as a baby when he went off to fight the war, is now a twenty-year-old man. Odysseus’s wife Penelope has waited for him all this time without remarrying or leaving his house, but a bunch of young men of Ithaca, hoping to get their hands on the wealth of the household of the great Odysseus, have been trying to get Penelope to marry one of them for years now. In the mean time, they have been shamelessly living off the resources of Odysseus’s house. In the midst of this situation, filled with the uncertainty of Odysseus’s whereabouts and pressure from the suitors to accept that Odysseus is dead, things begin to happen. As the Odyssey opens, Odysseus is in fact still very much alive and stuck on the island of the goddess Calypso. We’ll learn more about that in Book V of the Odyssey.