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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2009
Critical comment on the end of the Odyssey has centred on a two-fold question: first, is Book 24, together with the last 76 lines of Book 23, an interpolation? And secondly, does this final section of the poem add significantly to the content or meaning of the poem as a whole, whether or not its originality can be established? Two of Homer's early critics, Aristophanes and Aristarchus, are reported by the scholiasts to have placed the ending of the poem at Book 23, line 296. However, the terms used for ‘ending’ (πέρας, τέλος) are subject to varying interpretations. It is uncertain whether these expressions indicate that the text in its entirety ends at this point, or simply that the substance of the narrative ends here, in which case what follows is inessential. Recent commentators have carried on the controversy; however, despite some forceful arguments to the contrary, the dominant consensus now favours the Unitarian position. The present discussion will attempt to reinforce this position and specifically to explore some ramifications of the second Nekyia which have not yet been fully dealt with.
1. Denys Page is a vigorous supporter of the analytic approach in The Homeric Odyssey (Oxford, 1955)Google Scholar. Page particularly argues against the original status of the dialogue in the underworld: ‘The text itself affords clear evidence that the conversation of Achilles and Agamemnon was not originally designed to stand where it stands today’ (p. 119). More recent commentators, however, have concentrated on defending the place of the passages in question. Stanford, in his article ‘The Ending of the Odyssey: An Ethical Approach’ (Hermathena 100 (1965))Google Scholar, shows how the passages satisfy teleological expectations set up within the earlier narrative. Other critics have addressed the traditional objections more directly: Moulton, Carroll, in ‘The End of the Odyssey’ (GRBS 15 (1974), 153–69)Google Scholar, demonstrates the inconclusiveness of the arguments based on the Scholium and on linguistic anomalies within the passage; Wender's, DorotheaThe Last Scenes of the Odyssey (Memnosyne supplement 52 (Leiden, 1978)) makes the most concerted recent effort to dismiss the Aristarchan objections and establish the Unitarian viewGoogle Scholar.
2. Op. cit. above, n. 1.
3. All quotations are cited in Lattimore's, Richmond translations (The Iliad, Chicago, 1961Google Scholar, and The Odyssey, New York, 1968)Google Scholar.
4. As Auerbach, in Dante: Poet of the Secular World (Chicago, 1927)Google Scholar, notes, it is always the essential moment in the life of each character that is preserved permanently in the afterlife, especially in the Inferno.
5. Whitman, C. H., in Homer and the Heroic Tradition (Cambridge, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, argues that the description of Achilles' mourning ‘is a funeral scene, in form, differing from a real funeral only in that Achilles is as yet only symbolically dead’ (p. 202).
6. If, as Whitman suggests (op. cit., p. 200ff.), Patroklos embodies the human aspect of Achilles, then from the moment at which Patroklos dies, Achilles' death is a perpetually immanent fact.
7. See Whitman, , op. cit., p. 217Google Scholar. The role of Hermes as Priam's guide, the crossing of the Skamander and the barred gates of Achilles' residence (not mentioned elsewhere) are all suggestive of an underworld journey.