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The Lost Books of the Odyssey

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/litimag/imm022

1752-6566

Z. Mason,

Classical Antiquity Studies

Despite its complexity there are a handful of images central to the Odyssey—black ships drawn up on a white beach, a cannibal ogre guarding a cave-mouth, a man drifting lost in a trackless sea and coming back to a home that forgot him. In the pre-classical age this material was inchoate and fluid, with events shuffled into new narratives like cards in a deck. Some twenty-eight centuries ago these images crystallized into a fixed ordering that we know as the Odyssey, but rare echoes of alternative arrangements can still be seen on vase paintings, in surviving period manuscripts, and in diluted oral traditions surviving in the more desolate pockets of the eastern Mediterranean. Among these sub-species of Homerica there was one (which, like the rest, went extinct) that consisted of short improvizations that told and retold the events of the Trojan war and Odysseus's life. In these the...