Odysseus as Poet, as Philosopher: the Great Wanderings. By Mitchell Miller

This episode is a guest presentation about Homer's Odyssey by philosopher Mitchell Miller.  Here are Mitch’s own words of introduction to his talk:

“The Odyssey is the seminal Western story of homecoming.  Throughout the tales of what is known as the Great Wanderings, we hear Homer’s Odysseus reflecting on how to make his way home.  But what does coming home mean? How to prepare for it, how to sustain it?  And, poignantly, how might a couple in Odysseus's and Penelope's situation, separated by long absence and life-changing struggles, recover the intimacy and trust that had once been the center of their lives? 

“I read Homer as both a poet and philosopher who, by means of the extraordinary stories in the books of the Great Wanderings, helps us to understand how to respond to these deep human questions.  Odysseus vividly narrates, in the language of fantasy, episodes in which, among other close calls, he almost dies a grim death when encountering the monstrously huge one-eyed cannibal Polyphemus as well as the terrifying Scylla and Charybdis, comes to terms with the dread and treacherous witch Circe and the seductive nymph Calypso, and cleverly resists destruction by the Sirens.  He also tells of his daring descent into the underworld and the saving prophecy he receives from the shade of the blind prophet Tiresias.

“Tiresias brings into focus a theme that has run through all the stories Odysseus narrates, the ancient notion of xenia, that is, of the mutual obligations of guest to host and host to guest.  At the close of these reflections I find myself led to share an arresting possibility: can we hear in Tiresias’ prescription that Odysseus end his wanderings with an inland journey to propitiate the angry Poseidon a raising of this theme to the level of the perpetual question of how humankind may fulfill its obligations as a guest of the earth?  Is there implicit in Tiresias’ account of the ceremony of propitiation, the burial ceremony in which Odysseus is to plant his oar in the earth, a nascent call to address what is arguably the most acute challenge we face today, the call to bring art — that is, the craft or, as we now know it, the technology by which we seek to master the forces of nature —into harmony with nature itself?”

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Mitchell Miller is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College.  He has written extensively on Plato, Hesiod, and Parmenides.  In his books on Plato (including The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman [Martinus Nijhoff, 1980, and Parmenides Publishing, 2004] and Plato’s Parmenides: The Conversion of the Soul [Princeton University Press, 1986, and Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991]), he is fascinated by the irony, structure, and psychagogic power of the dialogues; he has also explored what Plato has Socrates call "the longer way" (Republic 435c-d), and he has attempted to recover, within the dialogues, exhibitions of what Aristotle reports as Plato's "unwritten teachings.”

For more information about Professor Miller, please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Miller_(philosopher)  and  pages.vassar.edu/mitchellmiller/ 

Professor Miller’s original presentation was delivered as The Andrew Steiner Lecture at St. John’s College (Annapolis), on October 24, 2009.  For this episode, he has replaced the initial five and a half minutes with new opening remarks.

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Show notes:

The following show notes to this episode on the Great Wanderings in the Odyssey are written by Professor Miller.

[1] I owe special thanks to two dear friends and dialogue partners in all things Greek at Vassar College, Professors in the Greek and Roman Studies Department Rachel Kitzinger and Rachel Friedman.  My debts to each greatly outstrip the following particular remarks, but for this occasion I want to single out Rachel Kitzinger’s keen insight into the homophrosune, “like-mindedness,” that emerges in and governs the mutual testing of each other that Odysseus and Penelope do in Book 23 of the Odyssey and Rachel Friedman’s illuminating examination of the dialectic between Homer’s and Derek Walcott’s notions of journey in the Odyssey and in Walcott’s Omeros.  Interested listeners to this podcast will be deeply arrested by Friedman’s Derek Walcott’s Encounter with Homer: Landscape, History, and Poetic Voice in Omeros (Oxford, 2024)  I also owe thanks to Professor John Peradotto, who introduced me to Homer many years ago; his Martin Classical Lectures, published as Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in the Odyssey (Princeton University Press, 1990), are a model of hermeneutic scholarship.  And on Homer’s ability to inspire heightened ‘seeing’ in his readers, I want to acknowledge Eva Brann’s Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (Paul Dry Books, 2002).  I am grateful as well to generations of Vassar students, to my colleagues in the Departments of Philosophy and of Greek and Roman Studies, and to an attentive audience when I gave this talk at St John’s College (Annapolis) as a Steiner Lecture in October of 2009.

[2] I refer in this talk to Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Odyssey (Viking, 1996).

[3] Listeners to this podcast episode will hear occasional sounds of chalk on a chalkboard as I punctuated my talk by drawing a map of the episodes that Odysseus guides us through in what we now call his “Great Wanderings” as he made his way home from Troy.  Unfortunately, it is not possible to reproduce the format of that map here, but this is really no matter; both my map and the list I will provide in note [4] are abstract to the point of being unhelpful — their usefulness depends on my success in making their significance concrete and vivid in the talk. 

[4] For the sake of reference, here is a list of the eleven fantastical episodes Odysseus narrates, each named after the most important figures Odysseus encounters: (1) the Lotus Eaters, (2) the Cyclops, (3) the bag of winds, (4) the Laistrygonians, (5) Circe, (6) his descent into the underworld to hear from the shade of Tiresias, (7) the Sirens, (8) Scylla, [9] the cattle of the sun, (10) Charybdis, and (11) Calypso.  Listing these episodes seriatim is, however, unrevealing of their real order.  As I will explain, they fall into groups of the first five (1)-(5), the descent into the underworld (6), and the last five (7-11), with the final five echoing the first.  What is more, within each five the first two are echoed by the last two, and the middle episode in the first five is echoed by the middle episode in the last five.  Finally, there is a sharp contrast between the first two episodes, between the fourth and fifth, between the seventh and eighth, and between the tenth and eleventh.  Thus, episodes (7)-(11) complete a ring structure with (1)-(5), and within these two fives, episodes (4)-(5) complete a ring structure with (1)-(2), and episodes (10)-(11) complete a ring structure with (7)-(8).

[5] Near the end of my talk I wrote on the chalkboard the strange Greek word that is correctly but inexpressively translated as “winnowing fan.”  It is athereloigon, a compound of ather-, “chaff,” and -loig-, “destroy.”

[6] The photograph that serves as the image for this episode was taken by Stephen Millark.  I thank him for permission to use it here.

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The snippets of flamenco you hear throughout this podcast’s episodes are inspired by, and draw on, not only traditional tropes of the art form but in particular the work of Diego del Gastor (Charles’ teacher), Paco de Lucia (everyone’s teacher in modern flamenco), and Luciano Ghosn. 

Charles wishes to thank Steve Griswold and Annice Kra for their help with this episode.  For more information about where Charles is coming from in this podcast as a whole, as well as the General Acknowledgments and the Dedication, please see “Philosophy on the Way” at https://griswoldphilosophy.podbean.com/ 

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