Odysseus (Book 23).
But it is not only loyalty which is tested in the Odyssey. It is an overtly moral poem in which villainy
meets its just deserts. The villains are those who do not care for a secure and prosperous world; and it is
especially by the testing of hospitality and inhospitality that the various societies visited by Odysseus are
distinguished. It is, of course, the suitors above all who abuse all the rules of civilized behaviour. They
ransack another man's property, try to murder his son, importune his wife, sleep with his servants, and use
his house for their riotous living. Their insolence towards all comers is illustrated in such profusion that
we hardly need the explicit moralizing of 22. 373-4:
'... so you may know in your heart, and say to another,
that good dealing is better by far than evil dealing.'This clear pattern of crime and punishment is quite different from the tragic inscrutability of the Iliad.
This is reflected on a divine plane also. The suitors offend the divine laws no less than the human-
'... fearing neither the immortal gods who hold wide heaven
nor any resentment sprung from men to be yours in future.'(22. 39-40)
Odysseus is not only a man reclaiming his own, he is an agent of divine punishment. The way that he
comes in disguise to test people, and then rewards or punishes their reception of him, draws on the
perennial 'story-pattern' of the god or angel or fairy who visits earth in humble disguise. It is not only
Odysseus' homecoming which is at stake, but our whole sense of whether the gods care about right and
wrong in this world. As long as the suitors flourish, this remains in doubt. The delight we take in the
outcome is voiced by the ancient Laertes when he exclaims
'Father Zeus, there are gods indeed upon tall Olympus,
if truly the suitors have had to pay for their reckless violence.'(24.351-2)
The pleasure we take in the Iliad is the pleasure proper to tragedy, the salvage of humanity amid
destruction: the Odyssey indulges our optimism, our hopes that all will turn out to be well, that the strange
beggar will set all to rights.
The Tradition
I have presented the Iliad and Odyssey as coherent works of art, held together on many levels by organic
links both sweeping and intricate, 'like a single whole living creature', as Aristotle put it. But this view has
been by no means an orthodoxy. I have up till now scarcely touched on the questions which dominated