Jessica’s Reviews > The Odyssey > Status Update

The sun went down and all the ways grew dark.

The Greek critic Longinus described it as an ‘ethical’ poem, a word that Cicero later explained (Orator, 37, 118) by a definition that could well be applied to the Odyssey, ‘adapted to men’s natures, their habits and every fashion of their life'.

The Odyssey is broad and inclusive: it is an epic poem, not in the Iliad’s way, with men and nations massed in the first conflict of East and West, but epic in its comprehension of all conditions of men – good and bad, young and old, dead and alive – and all qualities of life—subhuman, human and superhuman, perilous and prosperous, familiar and fabulous.

Homeric characters are quite different from those in a post-Freudian modern novel. Partly, this is because Homer lacks a wide conceptual and psychological vocabulary (there are, for example, no words for 'duty' or 'loyalty' in Homer). Homer's world is one of speaking and doing, where the will is almost the equivalent of the deed, and where motive remains largely unstated.