Word: odysseus
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...Wolf Pack. For those who came in late-a great many people educated at colleges with elective curriculums-The Odyssey is the story of the long voyage home from the Trojan Wars of Odysseus, lord of Ithaca, to be reunited with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. On the way, he and his men suffered such ordeals as imprisonment by brutish cannibal giants, shipwreck, seduction, famine and feast. Meanwhile, back at the palace, a half-hundred soft civilians squatted on the absent lord's domain, eating and drinking their heads off, seducing the maidservants, insulting the stripling heir...
...reality in the Homeric world; the poet had a peasant's narrow eye for each man's just portion and place at table. This apparently simple world was ruled by a supernatural order; divine justice, immediate and dramatic, awaited "those who would not think straight nor behave." Odysseus himself never failed to pay his sacrificial obligations to Zeus. The Spartan simplicity of what today might be called the economic base of Greek society was enriched by a complex and rich theological system...
Holy Pallas. Translator Fitzgerald, a Roman Catholic, is highly respectful of the supernatural goings-on in Homer. He considers Pallas-Odysseus' patron and therefore responsible for the workings of the hero's mind-to have her near equivalent in the Holy Ghost of the Christian Trinity. Here, too, may be seen the theological base of the incandescent Greek intelligence: faith and reason live together...
...because of the tight course Fitzgerald set himself. His aim was to make an easily spoken-verse story in the idiom of today, which is not notable for grandeur, elegance, or even the ceremonious conversational usages of a generation ago. How can anyone seriously be called Lord Odysseus, when even the perfunctory "Mister" is falling into ironic disrepute...
...said: "They say he still turns up around here, a soldier, a seaman, an old bum or something." Fitzgerald did not crowd his scholar's luck by asking any questions, but accepted gratefully this intimation that Homer's world was not dead-nor his Odysseus-in the hearts of the modern Greek...