Homer's Odyssey and the Near East by Bruce Louden (review)

The study of the densely woven fabric that holds together Aegean and Near Eastern cultures since the Bronze Age continues to fascinate researchers and readers. This book is a welcome addition to recent studies, which are advancing this field by moving past the rather impressionistic and cataloguing approach that prevailed in previous decades.

Louden's book advances in this direction in two central ways: First, its focus is narrow enough to allow for in-depth comparison, chiefly between the Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible, especially Genesis. Ad hoc treatments of the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ugaritic epics provide broader, though not exhaustive, Near Eastern contextualization. Second, Louden steadily follows a methodology and focuses on materials that reflect his expertise (as shown in his 2006 book on the Iliad), tracking narrative patterns and their thematic connections as variants of common "mythic genres" from which composers drew to meet their specific goals.

Louden shows that the stories in Genesis and the Odyssey share narrative motifs belonging to the subgenre of romance, understood as an idealistic narrative (good characters are ultimately favored by the gods and evil ones punished), and typically involve separation, adventure, and return to the homeland, climaxing with recognition scenes. Biblical and Homeric convergence is also evident in hospitality scenes, especially the subtype of theoxeny, where a god, appearing as a mortal, is hosted with positive or negative consequences. An example of positive theoxeny is Athena's visit to Nestor as a companion of Telemachus in Od. 1 and Abraham's reception of the angels in Genesis 18; of negative, the visit of the angels to Sodom and Gomorrah in Gen. 19 and Athena's guiding and helping of Odysseus against the suitors in Od. 17-22 (a "virtual theoxeny," since the goddess is not physically present, but acts through a disguised Odysseus). Divine councils and the destructions often resulting from them are another running theme, with a tripartite distinction between full-degree destructions (floods and such), middle-degree apocalypses or "contained apocalypses" (Troy, Sodom, the suitors, etc.), and "postponed apocalypse" (as in the New Testament). Louden complements his thematic and comparative dissection of the Odyssey with other important motifs, such as the katabasis and "vision" theme, broadening the scope of the comparison to Gilgamesh, Vergil, Plato, and Christian myth; fantastic sea voyages (cf. Jonah); and battles with monsters (Polyphemus, Humbaba in Gilgamesh), among others. The chapter on the Argonautic themes is methodologically weaker, as it mostly focuses on the points in common between the Jason-and-Medea and Jacob-and-Rachel stories, while the biblical connection with the Odyssey proper is indirect and dependent on the premise that the tenuous similarities between the Odysseus-Nausicaa and the Jason-Medea romances justify the further link with the biblical material.

Although not the main goal of this literary study, Louden does not hesitate to discuss the thorny issue of transmission in some detail. He sees these interconnections as dialogic and diachronic and points to the Northwest Semites, namely the Ugaritic and Phoenician cultures, as the main partners in the Greek and Near Eastern cultural encounter, with the Israelites as an offshoot of this axis (a word on how Mesopotamian material fits in would have rounded off the picture). Louden thus adds his voice to the already powerful chorus of scholars challenging the traditional perspective that the Indo-European inheritance best explains the essence of Greek culture (as opposed to the Greek language). More specifically, with his work, the Northwest Semitic realm continues gaining favor as the closest referent for many of Greece's developments (in the case of the Odyssey this was already explored in Les Phéniciens et Odyssée by Victor Bérard, in 1927). Most importantly, this study highlights the impact of the Greek heroic tradition on the Levant, informing narrative patterns in the book of Genesis. This west-to-east influence mostly followed the success of the Homeric poems, but was possible...