cimorene

After the Iliad and all I learned about the Greek society it portrays, I shouldn't be surprised by how much I'm disliking Odysseus in the Odyssey.

Or, like, it's not that his cleverness isn't engaging and sometimes sympathetic, so maybe it would be more accurate to say being put off by the values of the society he is a member of, many of which he mirrors. And given that these are cultural, you could probably argue that they aren't really personality. The tendency to raid, steal everything, kill the men and enslave the women is not only a way of life but a fact of life in this society - not everyone did it, perhaps, but surely no one was safe from it really. The facts of life of women and slaves in this world are very distracting, as I'm reading, but it's inextricable from the world itself if you look at it in any detail.

Reading is constantly novel and surprising, though, because of how widespread this story is and how many versions I've read that, it now seems to me, were doing some absolutely wild feats of redaction. There's a slim defense in the complexity of the context, which probably prevents easily explaining some facets to a casual modern audience at all, let alone to children. Yet I still feel that Odysseus himself as well as his men have been misrepresented, like... overall. He's not a hero, he's a guy whose main characteristic is sneakiness, and his position is that of a Sim in a game where he mostly survives because he's one of the players' (Athena's) favorite, even though Poseidon hates him and keeps sneaking onto the computer and trying to kill and torture him.

Really never expected to be on the cyclops' side, although Emily Wilson's introduction prepared me somewhat for a severe upset on reading that chapter. At this point I'm fully sympathizing with Poseidon.