'The World of Odysseus'

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Published in 1965 (rev. ed.), before the footnote revolution, The World of Odysseus is wonderfully clear and straightforward. Of course, some of what it says is (according to modern scholarship) exaggerated or irrelevant. For example, Finley is at pains to argue that the Greeks were not "primitive," and the scholar in me wants to know 1) what does he mean by primitive and 2) what does it matter?

Denial that the Greeks were 'primitive' is often an attempt to place Homeric epic apart and above the then-emergent field of comparative oral traditions. (Basically, the idea that you can learn about archaic Greek epic -- or any traditional epic -- by comparing it with epic traditions from other cultures.) Finley is fair-minded about this, according to his lights. In his appendix "The World of Odysseus Revisited," he argues that the Homeric-length poem recorded by the Slavic bard Avdo Medjedovic is inferior in quality to the Odyssey but that the methodology of oral tradition is still valid (143).

It is a great pleasure to read a book about the Odyssey and about those whose experiences shaped it (rather than a book about the other books about the Odyssey, which is how I would describe many more recent works in this field). The chapters on "Wealth and Labour," and "Household, Kin and Community" deal in a measured way with topics that are frequently underrepresented in classical scholarship. More recent works that covers these topics are often hijacked by trendy subfields, but Finley manages to cover them thoroughly and unemotionally, as far as I can tell. In "Wealth and Labor," his argument that the worst-off person was not a slave but a thes, an unattached person, was particularly cogent and striking (57ff). In "Household, Kin and Community" he vividly describes a world where almost none of a household's business had public relevance unless the head of household chose to make it so. His point is well taken since, with Homer as the foundation of Greek literature, classicists are sometimes tempted to fit 'the world of Odysseus' into the mold of a classical polis.

The World of Odysseus would be an excellent introduction to the background of the Iliad and Odyssey. It is also (as is pretty well apparent in my review) a great refresher for anyone already acquainted with the poems who is worn out by the tendentiousness of much current scholarship.

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