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Odysseus: A Life
From an acclaimed classicist comes a witty, unusual, and fascinating 'biography' of Homer's fictional Bronze Age hero, Odysseus
Everyone knows something about how he defeated the Trojans in a surprise attack with a massive wooden horse, wandered the Mediterranean seas for years trying to get home, confronted the Cyclops, and killed the suitors of his faithful wife Penelope back at his Ithaca palace. Odysseus turns up Homer's epics The Iliad and The Odyssey , Tennyson's poem 'Ulysses' (the Roman name for Odysseus), Constantine Cavafy's Ithaca , and more. Even the Coen brothers based a film, O Brother Where Art Thou , on his voyage. But no one has chronicled Odysseus' life from start to finish -- until now.
In this entertaining 'biography,' Charles Beye fills out the story of this extraordinary figure, at the same time portraying Odysseus' evolution through the course of a strange and adventuresome life, at times so remote, at times so immediate in the contemporary perspective.
Everyone knows something about how he defeated the Trojans in a surprise attack with a massive wooden horse, wandered the Mediterranean seas for years trying to get home, confronted the Cyclops, and killed the suitors of his faithful wife Penelope back at his Ithaca palace. Odysseus turns up Homer's epics The Iliad and The Odyssey , Tennyson's poem 'Ulysses' (the Roman name for Odysseus), Constantine Cavafy's Ithaca , and more. Even the Coen brothers based a film, O Brother Where Art Thou , on his voyage. But no one has chronicled Odysseus' life from start to finish -- until now.
In this entertaining 'biography,' Charles Beye fills out the story of this extraordinary figure, at the same time portraying Odysseus' evolution through the course of a strange and adventuresome life, at times so remote, at times so immediate in the contemporary perspective.
224 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
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81 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 18, 2017
It feels somewhat wrong to give the same number of stars to this book as The Iliad and The Odyssey; however, I've done just that because Beye has made Odysseus extremely accessible without this book being overly scholarly, and thus, overly dry. The style of the work is good and reconstructs Odysseus' life and times that a neophyte Greek historian like myself can digest. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to understand either of Homer's works a little more clearly.
I had just finished up the aforementioned books before getting into this one and it was very good to get a recap at the end. I only wish I had read The Aeneid prior, but c'est la vie? Now it's on to Ulysses (and if my previous encounter with Joyce is a harbinger of things to come, a commentary on that as well).
I had just finished up the aforementioned books before getting into this one and it was very good to get a recap at the end. I only wish I had read The Aeneid prior, but c'est la vie? Now it's on to Ulysses (and if my previous encounter with Joyce is a harbinger of things to come, a commentary on that as well).
February 22, 2019
Really interesting format. Ties together stories about Odysseus into one comprehensive story without getting into too many details about the sources. Has a very informal feel. Good read if you like Odysseus. Has some interesting insights and is very readable.
May 25, 2020
The author has stitched together a biography of the long enduring one by consulting sources and learned imagination. It is an entertaining, but diverting story only. Palamedes gets barely a passing mention, and then is excluded from the glossary of characters. Odysseus would approve.
March 17, 2025
Beye never quite manages to make the leap from historian to storyteller, but I can appreciate that this is an exceptionally readable account of Odysseus’ life as told by someone who very much comes off as a genial and well-read college professor.
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July 31, 2011How do you write a biography of a hero like Odysseus (or Beowulf or Abraham, for that matter)? Beye uses the few ancient sources we have, and intermingles some of his own cultural and psychological insights to fill in some of the gaps of the Odysseus saga.
Having taught The Odyssey dozens of times to my 9th-grade students, I felt that a lot of the ground wasn't new. I wish there had been more of a focus--connecting saga to archaeology, psychological insights, religion, etc.
Beye was also hamstrung by the messiness of Odysseus's ending (one reason why I never teach Book 24 in my classes). The fact is that Odysseus and Penelope don't live happily ever after--there is a dawn after their long, passionate reunion, and that dawn finds many of the leading families of Ithaca displeased by Odysseus's wholesale slaughter of their sons, the Suitors. Beye provides a number of suspected endings to Odysseus's life, including his own "best guess."
This is a good, not great, book that will help teachers of The Odyssey or those interested in filling in the gaps after reading The Iliad, The Odyssey or both.
Having taught The Odyssey dozens of times to my 9th-grade students, I felt that a lot of the ground wasn't new. I wish there had been more of a focus--connecting saga to archaeology, psychological insights, religion, etc.
Beye was also hamstrung by the messiness of Odysseus's ending (one reason why I never teach Book 24 in my classes). The fact is that Odysseus and Penelope don't live happily ever after--there is a dawn after their long, passionate reunion, and that dawn finds many of the leading families of Ithaca displeased by Odysseus's wholesale slaughter of their sons, the Suitors. Beye provides a number of suspected endings to Odysseus's life, including his own "best guess."
This is a good, not great, book that will help teachers of The Odyssey or those interested in filling in the gaps after reading The Iliad, The Odyssey or both.
August 20, 2008
Written as a biography, this 2004 book looks at the fictional character Odysseus, using a variety of sources such as "The Iliad," "The Odyssey," several plays of Sophocles, other ancient Greek epic tales, and background on Bronze Age Greece. Charles Rowan Beye is a professor of Classics at City University of New York. He also taught at Stanford and Yale. Giving the cultural context to "the man of many turns" is what makes this book so valuable and enjoyable.
January 12, 2014
clever book. written in style that mixes scholarly speech with apt and prosy storytelling, Beye revives Odysseus's tale in unexpected and interesting ways.
his insights are interesting and funny and sometimes even lewd. he pulls no punches: Odysseus is portrayed as an egotistical, womanizing, unhandsome, wanderer and man of his age who succeeds because he is Heroic not because he is heroic in our modern sense but because he has the favor of Athena and the wits to know it and use it.
his insights are interesting and funny and sometimes even lewd. he pulls no punches: Odysseus is portrayed as an egotistical, womanizing, unhandsome, wanderer and man of his age who succeeds because he is Heroic not because he is heroic in our modern sense but because he has the favor of Athena and the wits to know it and use it.
March 24, 2011
What do you call a biography of a (possibly) fictional character? Fiction? Non-fiction. I've gone with non-fiction, because this isn't a novel or a story. This book covers Odysseus' entire life, from birth right through the Trojan War and his wanderings in the Mediterranean. It's very well-written, although it does have a tendency to be a bit simplistic.
August 13, 2013
This is a creative attempt at a biography of this heroic, and likely fictional, character. There were some indulgences that Beye took in his narrative descriptions of Odysseus' adventures. However, the author used actual Greek history to inform the locations and events of the Homeric epics. It has served as a valuable reference to my ancient Greece unit.
September 20, 2007
Having read "The Odyssey" so young (4th or 5th grade), I thought maybe I should give it a try again to see what I missed. I just read this book instead, but have to say that I didn't miss anything. I get that Odysseus went on an epic voyage, but it just doesn't interest me. Sorry.
February 6, 2008
ok so maybe it was because I was sailing in the greek isles at the time, but I thought this book was really entertaining and droll. I almost had to re-read the odyssey-but I resisted.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews