Homer’s “Odyssey” and the Near East by Bruce Louden (review)

Homer’s Odyssey is a unique combination of a variety of myth genres and traditional narrative types that have their origins in the Near East. “Every individual motif that makes up the Odyssey is traditional; each of the genres of myth it uses is also a traditional type extant elsewhere” (13)—so argues Bruce Louden in his recent study, Homer’s “Odyssey” and the Near East. Louden, to be exact, identifies eighteen distinct genres of myth in the Odyssey’s makeup, among them theoxeny, romance, creation myth, combat myth, and catabasis, the five genres of myth that preoccupy the greater part of this thirteen-chapter study. Throughout the book, however, Louden touches on a number of other myth types lacking established labels, such as those that treat sea monsters and the fantastic voyage or the king who returns to his kingdom unrecognized and abused, in order to demonstrate that all of these genres are extant in Near Eastern mythic traditions.

Applying what he terms a “comparative typological and structuralist perspective” (4), Louden proceeds in each chapter to analyze and establish the various narrative types and myths, contrasting them with their Near Eastern counterparts. He begins with the divine council that opens the Odyssey and which is also found in Near Eastern works, where the same pattern occurs—three gods participating in the fate of the hero, the head god, the patron god, and the opposing god. From there Louden moves to instances of apocalyptic myth that he identifies in a number of Odyssey episodes: the destruction of the suitors, the destruction of the Phaecian ship, and the destruction of those who slaughter the sun’s cattle. And since, according to Louden, the majority of the poem’s episodes and motifs are provided by two types of myth, theoxeny and romance, these two genres take up most of the space in subsequent chapters, along with the theme of hospitality, a subset of the narrative type theoxeny in which, unknown to the host, his guest turns out to be a god in disguise. Louden throughout tries to establish various types of theoxenies found in the epic (negative, positive, and virtual) and their counterparts in the Old Testament (Genesis). In a similar manner he tries to establish Odysseus’s nostos within the well-defined conventions of his second major type of traditional narrative, romance, which he sees operating in all three large myth types serving as the organizing framework of the epic (Odysseus’s return, his voyage from Troy to Ithaca, and the vanquishing of the suitors).

Besides theoxeny and romance, Louden also considers the creation myth, which he equates with the episodes dealing with Kalypso and Ishtar, the [End Page e-6] Argonautic myth, in which he finds parallels linking Nausikaa, Kirke, Jason, and Medea to Jacob and Rachel. In Odysseus’s fantastic voyage episodes Louden parallels Odysseus and Jonah and later Ployphemos and Humbaba (Gilgamesh) as examples of combat myth. In the Odyssey’s underworld episodes (catabasis myth), the author finds parallels to 1 Samuel 28, Gilgamesh 12, Aeneid 6, Plato’s allegory of the cave, the Book of Revelation, and Exodus 32. Even Jesus is compared with Odysseus in the genre of myth involving a king returning unrecognized and facing abuse in his own kingdom.

Louden’s exhaustive analysis of the Odyssey’s various books and episodes and their parallels to Near Eastern works leads him at the end to three major conclusions. First, the Old Testament, more specifically Genesis, shares more with the Odyssey than any other ancient work, although the myths considered are also to be found in other Near Eastern cultures and more specifically in Gilgamesh. Since Genesis “repeatedly offers the most relevant and the greatest number of specific parallels,” Louden contends, “Homerists should embrace OT [Old Testament] myth as a valuable hermeneutic tool” (317). Second, Louden seeks to demonstrate that the various myths comprising Homer’s epic have more in common with Near Eastern myth than with Indo-European myth, as...