Make Better Choices: You ARE Odysseus

November 9, 2025 ~ sententiaeantiquae ~ 2 Comments

Many of us read the Odyssey for the first time because it is part of a certain kind of cultural inheritance in the literary canon. But we remain engaged with it, I think, because the character’s flexibility and adaptability. He is closer to us than some heroes, thanks to his physical vulnerability and his characteristic intelligence (instead of superhuman strength; and he goes through things. His journeys make for easy metaphors for our own; and his ability to persevere has made him an attractive model for philosophers and eventually theologians as well. He is a villain on the tragic stage; a rival in early rhetoric; and a sage by the Roman Empire. The Homeric Odyssey cannot contain everything the hero represents, but it does draw us in, asking the audience to wonder more about what could have happened if this hero’s life had been different in one small way…

Laura Jenkinson-Brown’s You are Odysseus finds new space for telling Odysseus’ story between the static audience engagement of reading and the immersive wandering of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. She sets out with a remarkable twist on how we engage with his story: what if we can intervene in some of his decisions? What if we can be author of a part of his tale? This may sound like a great leap from an ancient cliff, but it responds to the spirit of the Odyssey well. At the beginning of the poem, Zeus complains that “Mortals are always blaming us gods for their suffering / when they have suffering beyond their fate because of their recklessness” (1.30-32). His introduction offers a thematic framework that encourages audiences to ask how people make their own lives worse and how, in turn, it might be possible to make them better. You Are Odysseus takes the experience one step further.

I wasn’t surprised to find this book engaging and fun. L. Jenkinson-Brown has been the genius behind GreekMythComix for years, blending a heavy dose of facts with sharp and striking illustrations. As an educator, Jenkinson-Brown has a good sense of how to tell a story herself and makes great use of short, direct statements in often jarring collocations. Consider the effective coverage of the following graphic, which contains at a glance what it might take me a full lecture to convey:

One of the most interesting things about the way Jenkinson-Brown sets this up us that you can choose which character to read as, identifying as someone other than Odysseus. For the majority of us, the story traces the hero’s journey home, starting around the first event of Odysseus’ own story, the conflict between his men and the Cicones (told in Odyssey 9). Each episode is read addressed to the reader, numbered for their sequence in the overarching range of possibilities Jenkinson-Brown has sketched out.

What does choice in the Odyssey look like? Giving too much away would ruin any future experience, but let me give you a few samples. After Odysseus’ raft fails, the narrator gives the reader two choices

It is all too much. You resign yourself to the waves – and obscurity. Go to 143.

You’re not done yet – Zeus has decreed that you will return home! Go to 244.

The exhausted among us who are tempted to give into the sea’s embrace are treated to a few more paragraphs of regrets about Telemachus and Penelope before we’re invited to the epilogue (which contains an invitation to try again). If we choose to swim, we end up on the shore, talking to a sea bird, who may or may not be a god. Part of the fun of enjoying the Odyssey this way is that I know what kind of story to expect, and I find it in different pieces, refracted to me here, and reinvented for me there. But in the background is the Siren call of the story I already know as I search for it.

Another interesting aspect of this way of engaging with the tale is how the narrator can talk about the character’s gaze, thereby directing ours. After Odysseus has made the blood sacrifice to attract the souls of the dead, the reader is told that we start to feel “weak with panic” as our companions turn pale. The panic is punctuated by possible options:

I won’t spoil any surprises here. But if you know the Odyssey, you can guess some of what will happen next. I think it is that act of eliciting guesses though that commends this method of storytelling to me too. We know that ancient audiences were familiar with different details and variations of the big stories from ancient Greece. Some of the excitement from viewing this year’s version of a tragedy or listening to the most recent rhapsodic performance comes from discovering how the regular story would be told; but a certain degree of pleasure comes from suspense over which details of the story this accounting will tell.

Jenkinson-Brown is not shy about integrating other stories from myth, like the tale of the counterfeit Helen that comes as part of the episode involving Proteus, the old man of the sea. Such inclusions are far from disquieting, instead they remind of the way that others stories are always threatening to intrude on myth in Homer (and ancient Greece altogether). Jenkinson-Brown finds within this possibility the ability to tell of Odyssean counter-lives, not just the hero who gives up and never makes it home, but one who does make it home, but lingers in a hut like a hermit, waiting for something to happen, rather than striving to make it so.

Don’t worry if it seems like this approach may go too easy on Odysseus—the Muse speaks to him directly and catalogues exactly how many of his people died and whose fault it was (just before the final members of his crew disappear). Jenkinson-Brown takes creative turns—as in the section entitled “The Tragedy of Odysseus”, which, in centering the enslaved women as the chorus reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad before Odysseus sings outside his house about his desire to be “Odysseus again”. Just as in tragedy, there’s a recognition scene (here, Eumaeus misrecognizing Odysseus). The confusion ends up with multiple main characters deceased thanks to a certain scar not convincing anyone. Athena, that classic dea ex machina, appears to declare “he was not what he was / his choices all were wrong, / and now his story ends – / before an Epic tale, / a tragedy instead”. The epilogue is one of the collection’s finer points from the serious side of things. Jenkinson-Brown closes by making the point that Odysseus’ decisions are not simple, interwoven as they are with the tensions between mere survival and attempt to be some kind of a moral agent. The difference for us, however, is that thanks to Jenkinson-Brown’s work we can experiment with doing the whole thing again.

The combination of irreverence and seriousness keeps readers moving through the choices, uncertain. I don’t think there is a wrong way to read this book: each episode has some insights on its own; even where there are departures from Homer, they are instructive and intriguing. One could quibble about not being able to be one of the suitors or that certain of our favorite tales are left out. But the pleasure of reading through a fast-paced journey that manages to be knowledgeable and funny at the same time is undeniable.

This is easiest read on actual paper! But the prose is clear and direct, and the leaping from scene to scene makes has the effect of creating excitement and some confusion. There’s a knowing wit to the retelling as well, as when Odysseus is with Circe and we read “As your men drift off to find a comfortable place to sleep for the night – not the roof, you remind them – Circe slips her hand into yours and draws you aside.” The dark humor of the reminder, recalling Elpenor for those who know, stands strangely next to the nearly saccharine hand-holding. But there’s something about it that rings true in just that Odyssean ways of rendering lies that sound like the truth. The narrator frequently characterizes emotions, effectively emphasizing an interior experience, flipping the normal, distanced engagement with Homer on its head.

There are many ways I can imagine using this book in the classroom or with readers coming to Homer from different backgrounds. I think this approach could pair really well with Gareth Hinds’ graphic novel of the Odyssey for readers who don’t have the time or the practice to get through a translation for the first time. Then, again, it also provides enough information to support learning about the Odyssey on its own. I read through this one with my daughter (15) who has read Hinds’ graphic novel and has been listening to me drone on about Odysseus for years. She thinks Jenkinson-Brown’s approach is better than mine, and she has some experience! If she and I both like this book, there’s a good chance there’s something in it for you too.

Go to this link if you want to purchase the book.

Go to this one if you’re still thinking about it.

Save the Humanities With This One Simple Trick!

January 11, 2021January 11, 2021 ~ Joel ~ 11 Comments

I am entirely aware that the following review of Eric Adler’s The Battle of the Classics cuts a little deep and comes at an inopportune moment. Nevertheless, Adler sent me this book before the outbreak of white supremacist and rightwing violence last week prompted multiple calls for increased training in the humanities. Our context and Adler’s implicit invitation prompted me to finish and post this review, despite our collective exhaustion.

To be clear, Adler’s book has no connection to last week’s coup. But there’s a cyclical and reactive debate about the impact of the humanities on current events, and claims that the humanities are not political are as vacuous as those insisting they are responsible in some significant way. In a sense, both Adler and I serve as mere proxies in broader, contentious debates.

Indeed, I was hesitant to post this review at all for fear of appearing less kind than I aspire to be or of giving the ideas in this book additional attention. Yet I grow increasingly tired of our intellectual histories pretending objectivity while still supporting a trenchantly ideological system. We need Classicists to perform critical and honest histories of our field to help us chart better courses forward. We don’t need sophistic prevarication.

The reaction of many humanists and classicists to the ‘revelation’ that our fields are racist in practice and in origin is not dissimilar to the responses by white intellectuals and politicians to the 1619 Project, which Trump has countered with the risible 1776 Project: resistance, minimization, denial, and outright violent rejection. Even those who try to accommodate new historical analyses may suffer cognitive dissonance, reluctant or incapable of acknowledging that the degree to which one realizes how toxic academia—and classics—is depends upon one’s own positionality.

It is a farce for any field of critical inquiry to refuse to conduct or accept a critique of its own history. To study the past without being interested in how earlier generations shaped this study and how their political, racial, gendered, and otherwise formative discourses influenced them is to engage in intellectual cosplay. This is, of course, an insult to the latter: at least cosplayers know they are engaging in fantasy. How much more ironic and hypocritical it is, then, for a field so proud of the Delphic “know thyself” to resist the practice of doing so!

Some readers are going to leave this piece with a forced misconception, carrying some ridiculous takeaway like “Homerist cancels Homer” or the like. (There’s a free headline for you!) Much to the contrary, this is a call to live up to the aspirations of the practice of the humanities, to force ourselves to be more than simple agents of tradition.

Adler’s primary emphasis in his book—that we need to advocate for the humanities based on their substance or content—is left abstract until its end. It is also at the end that some potential audiences emerge. What starts as a softer, center academic voice (see Adler’s welcome critique of the neoliberal university and educational consumerism) drifts rightward in the conclusion, characterizing Reed college’s inclusion of Mexico City and the Harlem Renaissance in its Hum 110 course as “a capitulation to contemporary American identity politics…[which] reinforces the sense that reforms, nominally aimed at a genuine cosmopolitanism, instead underscore American provincialism” (Adler 220).

Of course, I have excerpted the previous statements to make it seem as if Adler were making them and not merely repeating the kinds of things people say (which is how the paragraph is couched) because the closing chapter, intentionally or not, flirts with dog-whistles and gives a platform to arguments familiar to readers (or victims) of Quillette and the Heterodox Academy, at its best, and the ravings of less rational actors, at the worst.

Once he offers an overview of some texts he might suggest for the “wisdom of the ages”, Adler suggests, “In such a curriculum, diversity and inclusiveness remain important organizing principles. Yet they are not attained by a relentless, tokenizing pursuit of representativeness for its own sake. On the contrary, they emerge from a more intellectually serious investigation of how we as a species have sought to answer the most fundamental questions of life” (222).

This all may sound reasonable on the surface, until one imagines how these phrases resound with certain audiences and how they appropriate the language of inclusive pedagogy and practice to signal that there is a higher principle of rigor and quality. These are like the words of colleagues I have encountered who are happy to hire a woman or BIPOC scholar, as long as we don’t have to sacrifice “quality” to do so.

This summary also leaves out how selectively Adler shapes his intellectual history and how much his argument relies on the deeply problematic conservative scholar Irving Babbitt. On the whole, this book provides a somewhat interesting overview of some debates over the classical humanities in higher education in the United States. It is not clear, however, that the discussions paced over a century would have been recognized by anyone as a specific or continuous “Battle of the Classics”. In ignoring the fact that the “Classics” have always been selective and exclusive (and in eliding the Humanities and Classics), Adler joins his subjects as idealizing the content of the Classical tradition irrespective of the process that delivered it.

In aiming to argue for a “wisdom of the ages” that improves the human condition, Adler trains his gaze always on the idea of the objects rather than the subjects who benefit from them. At some level, I do deeply agree with the plea that we should focus on how the humanities can make us better humans—I just think this is a capacity we bring to the texts as subjects ourselves rather than magical qualities a set of texts may grant to us with the right shamans as our guides.

Allegory of the Seven Liberal Arts, Maerten de Vos, 1590 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marten_de_Vos_Seven_liberal_arts.jpg

Defending the Humanities by Definition

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Say Something Once, Why Say it Again? A New Edition of the Odyssey

November 18, 2017November 18, 2017 ~ sententiaeantiquae ~ 1 Comment

So, a few days ago I received in the mail the first Classical text I have ever pre-ordered (by almost a year): M. L. West’s new Teubner edition of the Odyssey:

Even before I received it, I knew I would have some issues with it. West has long been a proponent of a strictly textualist view of Homer–which means his goal in editing the Iliad or the Odyssey is to restore the epics to something closer to what the ‘original’ ‘author’ had in mind. Even with modern authors, I think we emphasize individual agency, creativity and genius to the detriment of cultural contexts and audience reception far too much. For the Homeric epics, which arise from oral performance tradition and which have undergone generations of transformations in the textualized forms, the peril of overemphasizing the importance of an ‘author’ is even greater.

So, West’s final great work was going to ruffle my feathers–indeed, he announced many of his intentions in his Making of the Odyssey. What I was looking forward too, however, was an edition with an updated apparatus criticus integrating new Papyri and manuscripts unavailable to Von der Mühll when he edited the text. In the accumulation of testimonia as well as readings, West’s edition does not disappoint. The text is quite readable.

But there are some problems. Minor: he uses iota adscripts instead of subscripts and offers a more liberal application of the nu-moveable. These are merely aesthetic annoyances for me….

The major problem is that West excises many repeated lines or passages that have almost always been included in editions and relegated them to the apparatus if there is some papyrological or testimonial justification for doing so. In addition, he brackets lines that are not typically bracketed. So, West eliminates some lines that Von der Mühll preserves, e.g. 9.30 and labels others as spurious (e.g. 9.55). But really takes it further. (See the group discussion on these issues for more examples and some fine defenses and explanations).

West, of course, does this because he thinks many lines have been repeated by the process of transmission and that the writerly Homer would never have repeated so much. West is welcome to this opinion–and it is not alone in it. But the relegation of some many lines is quite striking and renders the text useless alone (in my opinion). I cannot imagine using this with undergraduates or advising a casual reader of Homer to use this instead of the old Teubner or even Allen’s OCT.

The editorial choices will change some interpretation as well. Some are idiosyncratic but have support (such as West’s decision to go with the double accent ἄνδρά μοι ἔννεπε instead of the common and more widely accepted ῎Ανδρα μοι ἔννεπε for 1.1). Others may alter what the text means, as when he goes with ἄνθρωποι, μήδε σφιν ὄρος πόλει ἀμφικαλύψαι instead of ἄνθρωποι, μέγα δέ σφιν ὄρος πόλει ἀμφικαλύψαι for Od. 13.158. In his reading, the infinitive ἀμφικαλύψαι becomes negative command–thus Zeus is ordering Poseidon not to drop a mountain on the Phaeacians.

There are many issues like this throughout the text. I will probably highlight some now and then. But when I started posting about it on twitter, a dozen or so people joined in with enthusiasm, expertise, and bibliographies! I have storified the several conversations as a group review of West’s edition. Check it out–I learned a lot from those involved and we inadvertently illustrated how useful twitter can be.