The frameworks of time and place may again prove a way of bringing out some of the 'thematic geology'.
The handling of the time-scheme is rather similar to that of the Iliad. Odysseus was ten years returning
from Troy, but the poem picks up only the last forty days or so, and one-third of the poem (Books 16-23)
takes only two days. Care is taken in the opening 100 lines of the poem to associate the taking up of the
stories of both Odysseus and his son Telemachus, though they are worlds apart on anarchic Ithaca and the
unreal island of Calypso. The number of days between then and their reunion in time and place at the
shepherd's farmstead in Book 16 is carefully limited, though not precisely plotted. Odysseus' time on
Phaeacia, however, is made to fit into three days (the middle one including the tales of his wanderings
stretches from 8. 1 to 13. 17).
There is a certain symmetry to the two climactic days on Ithaca. At 16. 1 dawns the day which sees
Odysseus enter his palace and endure maltreatment at the hands of the suitors and their minions. At the
end of 18 the suitors go to their own homes for the night; but we are made to wait before Odysseus sleeps.
First there is his long interview with Penelope, which is itself held in suspense when the aged nurse
Eurycleia finds her master's old scar. Eventually Odysseus beds down in the opening lines of Book 20,
only to hear his maidservants giggling on their way to join the suitors:
He struck himself on the chest and spoke to his heart and scolded it:
'Bear up, my heart. You have had worse to endure before this,
on that day when the irresistible Cyclops ate up
my strong companions, but you endured it until intelligence
got you out of the cave ...'The next day, however, gets off to a good start. Zeus thunders, and Odysseus overhears an old woman
who is grinding corn:
Father Zeus .... you show this forth, a portent for someone.
grant now also for wretched me this prayer that I make you.
On this day let the suitors take, for the last and latest
time, their desirable feasting in the halls of Odysseus.(20.91-121)
This is the day set for the contest of the bow and axes. It does not come to an end until Odysseus and
Penelope have gone to bed, have made love, and have talked. (The strange episodes of Book 24 take one
further day.)
Within these few days, however, the Odyssey knows scarcely any limits in place. This is very different
from the Iliad. The Iliad looked outward from a narrow focus at Troy: in the Odyssey the journeys are
converging, and converging from various places. It is a poem of the sea as well as of land, it reaches to the
verges of the known world, and beyond into the realms of fable, and even ventures to the underworld of
the dead (briefly in Book 24, as well as in Book 11). The opening lines of the entire poem prepare us for