In this first chapter, Homer invokes the muse to sing to him of

the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.

The muse apparently refuses to do any such thing, since we won't see hide nor hair of Odysseus for several more chapters.

By the way, just to give a little background on this: Odysseus is the man of twists and turns literally, in terms of the journey he's taking, trying to get home to Ithaca from Troy; but I like to think that Homer might also be referring to Odysseus' cleverness. Odysseus was the shrewdest and trickiest of the Greeks -- it was he, for instance, who came up with the idea of the Trojan Horse. Before the Trojan War even started, he tried to get out of going to fight it by pretending to be insane. I believe he hitched up his plow to some non-plow-appropriate animal and pretended to be sowing salt when the Greeks came to get him to come and fight.

Odysseus, by the way, is married to Helen's sister Penelope. He was smart enough to go for the one who was beautiful enough to make any man happy, but not so stunning that her husband could never have a moment's peace of mind. Helen of Troy always makes me think of that song where the chorus goes something like

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life,
Never make a pretty woman your wife!
From my own personal point of view,
Get an ugly woman to marry you.

Shallow, but funny. But I digress.

So Odysseus is not just smart -- he's cunning. Sneaky. Not straightforward. Twisty-turny. Look at how he brought the war to an end. He really has to be something of an anti-hero to modern eyes; and if you're feeling just plain admiring of him, please go read Euripides' "Trojan Women." Go read it anyway, in fact. It's a wrenchingly beautiful telling of what it's like to be on the losing side of the war in ancient Greek times.

This is the man whose story Homer is begging the muse to tell him about. As I mentioned, she doesn't oblige, at least not right away.

Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, has it in for Odysseus, which is why it's taken the guy so long to get home. Odysseus has spent ten years fighting a war he never wanted any part of --

--oh, right! I was going to tell you why the war started in the first place. Sure, you know that Helen ran off with Paris. Aphrodite made her fall in love with him, and the interesting thing about Greek morality at the time was that even if the gods forced you to do something like that, you still got the blame for screwing up. (Granted, if you did something fabulous, you'd get the credit, too. But still.) It ran something along the lines of: if you hadn't been a person capable of doing what the gods had tapped you to do, you wouldn't have done it even when they waved their magic wands. So even though they *made* you do whatever it was, it was still *you* doing it, in every sense. Therefore, your fault.

There's a great deal about this in a terrific collection of four plays by Euripides called "Women on the Edge," which I cannot recommend highly enough. Suffice it to say, none of this was Helen's idea, but she still got the blame.

I am way too tired at this point to go into the whole beauty pageant of the gods and why Aphrodite promised Paris the most beautiful woman in the world if he'd say she was the purtiest thang up on Olympus. Look it up, or better yet run to the library and grab a copy of D'Aulaire's Book Of Greek Myths, another tome I can't recommend highly enough. It'll tell you everything you need to know.

One thing I'll mention here is that the reason Odysseus is along for this war is that he swore he'd fight for Helen if push came to shove. He was a suitor of Helen, back when she was being married off, as was the custom, by her father. Daddy wasn't a dope. Every guy in Greece wanted Helen's hand in marriage, and as soon as one was chosen, Helen's dad knew that another would fight to the death for a chance at Helen, and it would just never end. Helen was the daughter of a god (Zeus) and a human, and was supernaturally beautiful. Guys had been trying to put the moves on her since she was ten.

I remember thinking how ridiculous an idea that was the first time I read it. Grown men, just regular guys and not icky, falling in love with basically a kid?

Then, one day at a homeschooling class I was teaching through the local Y, I saw a girl who was just heart-stoppingly beautiful. She was, yes, ten years old, and she looked ageless. She looked like a woman. I remember thinking, well, that explains a lot. I also remember thinking that if that was *my* daughter, I'd be investing in some serious padlocks and a scowling, scary-looking chaperone.

So Helen's dad did something smart. He told the suitors he'd decided who would be allowed to marry Helen. But before he would tell them who it was, they would all have to swear a solemn oath that all of them would protect the rights of the winner to the death, if necessary. Obviously, anyone who wouldn't take the oath would be out of the running. The Greeks took this kind of thing seriously, and Helen's dad knew that no one who took the oath would break it. Not only would none of them lay a hand on the winner, but they would take up arms and raise an army to get Helen back should anyone try to wrest her away from her rightful owner -- I mean, husband.

Sorry. I love the Greeks, but patriarchal doesn't even begin to describe them.

Odysseus had been a suitor of Helen, way back when. He didn't get her, but he lucked out with her sister, Penelope. They're very happy, have just had their first (and only) son. (Not a very fertile family, by the way. Penelope has one son. Helen has one daughter. In the days when sons were a sort of immortality and birth control wasn't exactly an option, this starts to look like divine displeasure.) The kid is just a baby, and now he has to go fight a war because Menelaus' wife got all gaga over Paris.

So Odysseus has been off for ten years fighting to get Helen back; then another ten being blown off-course all over the place trying to get home. Ancient Greece is not a good time or place to have the god of the ocean ticked at you.

Now Odysseus is stuck on an island with a beautiful immortal, Calypso the nymph. She wants him for her husband, and this being a pre-feminist age, doesn't much care that he's already married. She can't make him love her, but she can keep him there even if he doesn't.

Poseidon is off on a business trip in Ethiopia, so the rest of the gods get together for a quick meeting about how to solve a problem like Odysseus. Zeus, king of them all, starts going on and on about how people are always blaming the gods for their problems when really they bring said problems on themselves. The gods were nowhere near the place. They were practicing their golf.

Athena, his daughter and the goddess of wisdom (and a big Odysseus fan), interrupts him politely (he's the god of thunder and lightning -- stay on his good side). What about Odysseus? Has he forgotten about him?

Hardly. But it's not Zeus' fault that Poseidon is cheesed off at Athena's current favorite. The big Z doesn't say so, but it's really Odysseus' fault for ticking off one of Poseidon's sons -- or at least letting said son know, by name, exactly who outsmarted him. Odysseus never can resist putting his name out there. More about that later.

Okay, dad, Athena sighs; but can't we help him anyway? I don't know about you guys, but I'm going to go down and talk to his son, Telemachus.

Which gets us all of three pages into the first book, and I'm falling asleep here and will pick this up again tomorrow!

--Deborah