Deception and Dreams in Homer's Odyssey

 by Brett Rutherford

The narrative structure of The Odyssey permits Odysseus himself to narrate the central part of the epic in the first person. Where the epic begins, and ends, with an impersonal omniscient voice (Homer’s) capable of divining the thoughts and actions of gods and men, a key part of the story — Books IX through XII — is told by the hero himself in his own words.

Through this device, the epic’s hero becomes the Bard, narrating his own story. He gains in narrative power, because he speaks as a man to his fellow mortals, but he loses the ability, in these adventures, to speak for the gods or to narrate distant events.

This part of The Odyssey contains the most extreme demands on our suspension of disbelief: the encounter with Polyphemus and the Kyklops, the horrific meeting with Scylla and Charybdis, the descent into the underworld, and the stay on the island of the dreaded witch/goddess Kirke.

This raises the possibility that this part of the narrative consists of ‘“whoppers,’“ tall-tales told by Odysseus to entertain his hosts. If this is so, these more supernatural episodes are susceptible to interpretation outside the narrative of The Odyssey. Are they dreams, myths, and wishes? Are they outright deceit on the part of Odysseus to explain away the’ loss of his ship and crew and obtain the largesse of a rich host?

There is clear evidence, in the text itself, that Odysseus was out to best the court poet Demodokos. His listeners had accepted the Kyklops and Kirke stories, and perhaps they were stories they had heard before, and were amused to hear as first-hand reports. But when Odysseus, in Book XI, goes where no man has gone before and returned, the Underworld, and begins to catalog all the famous women of antiquity, whom he recognizes without even having a spirit guide, his hosts cut him off with these lines:

The king said: “As to that, one word, Odysseus: from all we see, we take you for no swindler -- though the dark earth be patient for so many, scattered everywhere, baiting their traps with lies of old times and places no one knows.

“You speak with art, but your intent is honest. The Argive troubles, mid your own troubles, you told as a poet would, a man who knows the world.” (Odyssey xiii:421-427)

This is a polite warning from the king that Odysseus has gone too far. His tale is too extravagant and has gone beyond the remotely possible, precisely because Odysseus slipped into an omniscient narration in his catalog of women. The king then urges Odysseus to return to things he knows, specifically what the dead Greeks in Troy might have told him.

In the passages that follow, Odysseus interviews the shades of Agamemnon (who describes his murder by Klytemnestra), Achilles (who learns some details about the fall of Troy from Odysseus), and Ajax. Then, Odysseus goes wild again, and sees mythical figures including Tityos, Tantalos, Sisyphus, and Heracles.

If Odysseus is the clever pathological liar he seems to be, he uses his interviews with the dead Greeks to establish two things: (1) he actually went to the underworld because there is no other way he, adrift all these years, could know about Agamemnon’s  murder, and (2) he was really at Troy, because he can instruct the shade of Achilles on what happened after the great hero’s death.

Even though the hell journey ends with more inconceivable descriptions, the heart of the narrative re-establishes the credibility of Odysseus. The king falls for it.

Let us consider in more detail the setting in which Odysseus launches upon his first-person narrative. As guest of King Alkinoos and the Phaiakians, Odysseus, at dinner, listens attentively as their own bard, Demodokos, relates three stories — one of an early argument between Odysseus and Achilles; one about the illicit love affair between Aphrodite and Ares; and finally, the tale of the fall of Troy, with Odysseus’ own role in it.

Odysseus is keenly aware that his hosts have a child-like craving for tales involving gods and men, so he is tempted to relate his own misfortunes in the most expansive way. Under the spell of wine and an appreciative audience, and inspired by his host’s bard, did Odysseus exaggerate, fantasize, or even lie?

The episodes narrated in the first person by Odysseus are the only portions of the book that involve supernatural characters other than familiar Greek gods. Calypso, a goddess, is all but human; the travails of Penelope and Telemachus are those of a real wife and a real son. The action, like that of The Iliad, is an intertwined narrative of humanistic gods and heroic men and women. All of these events can be taken as credible to audiences in Homer’s time, even if the actions of the gods are taken either as symbolic or as a literary device.

But can we believe that even the Greeks of Homer’s time still believed in one-eyed Kyklops, multi-tentacled Scylla, or the witch Kirke transforming men into pigs? And can the descent into Hades to consult with Tiresias be anything more than a dream? These events from Odysseus’ first-person narrative beg to be taken as a ‘“poem within a poem,’“ not to be seen as literal narrative, but as symbolic of the hero’s quest for home, hearth, family and life itself.

The story of Polyphemus, the Kyklops, devouring Odysseus’ crew one by one, in ghastly detail, could be a nightmare recollection of the tale of Saturn devouring his children, the Olympians. As the Titans castrated their father Ouranus, Odysseus emasculates and disempowers Polyphemus by penetrating and burning out his single eye. Freudians can have a field day with this one, a Bronze Age cannibal nightmare of human gore.

In an episode that has the dream-like quality of near-repetition, Odysseus and his crew encounter the hideous King Antiphates and his equally hideous queen whose minions repeat the rock-throwing attack of Polyphemus, forcing Odysseus to flee a second time from flying boulders.

In another episode, King Aiolos hosts Odysseus, equips his ship and sends him off for home with a magic wind-bag that can provide unfailing breezes. When Odysseus’s crew breaks into the windbag suspecting it contains treasure, the magic is broken arid Odysseus is driven back to King Aiolos’s court a second time. In a turnabout characteristic of dreams, the hero is rejected with scorn by his former hosts, who now curse him and drive him out. This too is a dream episode circling back upon itself.

Although Scylla and Charybdis are based on an actual whirlpool and a dreaded rock against which sailors were sometimes dashed, the depiction of Scylla as a man-devouring giant squid is hard to miss. The squid, as well as its oceanic framework, is a powerful female symbol, and the squid’s parrot-like beak into which men are pulled and devoured is a symbol of both being eaten and being castrated. The whirlpool Charybdis is an all-­consuming maelstrom that also devours men, dashing them to the sea floor into smithereens. This, too, is a powerful symbol of the female as destroyer. This is the same dread of the Maelstrom. that transfixed Poe and Verne.

Finally we come to the witch/goddess Kirke, whose name means falcon or hawk, on the island of Aeaae (a palindrome name which means “wailing.”) Unlike the irresistible Calypso who is man’s vision of a yielding goddess, Kirke is the Dark Woman, the woman of danger, capable of drugging, emasculating, or even turning men into beasts. The details Homer uses to describe Kirke and her tamed animals are rich in an elder mythos that may predate the Olympians. She feeds her swinish victims acorns and carnelian cherries, the food of the dead in Hades. This suggests that the souls of the transformed men may be in some death-state. Kirke can only be conquered by an anti-potion, and by securing her vow not to harm Odysseus. Once conquered, she is surprisingly compliant — like her near relation Medea, she makes a perfect spouse, once tamed.

The story of Odysseus and Kirke has a strange mirror relationship with the final resolution of the story of Odysseus and his wife Penelope. Kirke may be viewed as the Jungian shadow of Penelope, in a dream-vision that reverses and prefigures everything in the denouement in Ithaka. Kirke’s name means “falcon” and one meaning of Penelope is “striped duck” — a hunting bird, raptor with talons, versus the calm, aquatic, home-and-husband-loving duck. Both Kirke and Penelope sit weaving at a loom.

Penelope is surrounded by suitors who are killing off and eating all her kingdom’s livestock. Kirke kills off all the men who visit her island, converts them into livestock and (we presume) eats them, or serves them up to her next victims.

Odysseus rescues his crew from Kirke’s clutches, presumably returning their souls from some kind of limbo or Hades; in Ithaka he will kill the suitors and send their souls to Hades, where they will be sorted out as unworthy souls.

Arriving on Kirke’s island, Odysseus demonstrates his mastery and manhood by killing an antlered deer. This act, described in detail; establishes him as hunter-master with a claim to the domain. When Odysseus returns to Ithaka disguised as a beggar, he must establish his manhood against the suitors, with his prowess and archery.

When Kirke offers herself to Odysseus, he says, “Now, being a man, I could not help consenting.” In this dream episode, she then becomes Penelope’s shadow double: she feeds him, bathes him, lavishes upon him all conceivable feminine attentions. Only the protests of the sailors put an end to this idle delusion.

At home, Odysseus has a stalwart son, Telemachus. In the Kirke sequence, Odysseus has a favored young companion, Eurylokhos, whom he treats as a son and who comports himself bravely, even taking Odysseus to task for seeming too willing to give in to Kirke’s wiles.

A god, Hermes, comes to Odysseus and advises him on how to conquer Kirke; back in Ithaka, Athena provides wise counsel on how to defeat the suitors. Hermes is the god who delivers messages in dream-sendings; hence, he belongs in the Kirke dream. Athena is banished from the Kirke adventure altogether.

Finally, Kirke, a shadow, only releases Odysseus from the dream world in which she had held him captive on the condition that he first make the dread journey to meet the shades from Hades, who come to taste the blood from a ram sacrifice and must speak the truth. In this nightmare vision, Odysseus meets a long succession of historic and mythic  persons. He must plunge into death in order to return to life.

Once the first-person narration ends and Odysseus is returned to Ithaka in Book XIII  — significantly, while sleeping, Homer’s epic returns to gods and men, and there are no more witches or twelve-legged monsters with which to contend. Significantly, the first person he speaks to is Athena in disguise, confirmation that’ he is in the waking world.

It is not unlikely that Odysseus earned from his guests, in exchange for his wild tales, a much needed sleeping potion, and a kind return home. The drugged transport was also a way to help prevent Odysseus from retracing his steps, should he have military ambitions against other city-states. And the blind bard of the court was probably glad to see him go, too, not desiring any local competition.

The search for dream imagery in The Odyssey can also center on bird symbols.  Kirke is a falcon. Penelope is a duck. Athena’s symbol is an owl; and Hermes, an Egyptian deity at heart, is represented by the ibis bird. The weapon of choice in The Odyssey is the arrow — arrows are bird-like, fletched with the feathers of birds.

In all the captivities depicted in the epic, it is bird-freedom which is denied Odysseus. Wingless monsters and witches are all rooted to their places: Calypso cannot leave her island; Kirke stays in her magical palace; the Kyklops and Antiphates are earth- bound troglodytes who can only hurl giant rocks. Scylla, Carybdis and the Sirens, too, are tied to their locales cannot leave them, patient as spiders in their webs. The dead mill about in Hades, going nowhere. Only Odysseus and his hapless sailors, and Telemachus and his traveling companions, possess the means, or will, to move from place to place. As if to reinforce the idea of being rooted to one place, Poseidon punishes the Phaiakians for transporting Odysseus by petrifying their ship (xiii:200) so that “We make an end, henceforth of taking, in our ships castaways who may land upon Shkeria.: (xiii:225)

Seeing the center of The Odyssey as a tall tale in no way diminishes Homer’s art, and permits us to examine how the classic workings of dreams can form a microcosm of myth within a larger work of art. The entire Kirke-Odysseus episode, in terms of structure alone, shows a wonderful mirror symmetry in Homer’s art. As Penelope becomes her  shadow Kirke, reality infuses dream, in epic as in life.

— Providence, RI
March 2005 /
Pittsburgh, PA
August 2026

Quotations from the Fitzgerald translation.