![]() ![]() ![]() Ulysses and the Sirens (1891), by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). But at least one thing is for sure: Odysseus clearly avoided the doom of falling victim to the song of his own Sirens. But here is a relevant question, which makes the text of my essay here more playful than the text I submitted for World Epics: am I now falling victim to a “siren song”? I leave it to my readers to decide. ![]() And I am starting to think that such a predicament is inevitable, since my aim in writing my essay on the Odyssey is to provide a companion-piece to the essay by Casey Dué on the Iliad, already mentioned, which as I should now add is another work that I very much admire. In writing my essay, I found myself in a predicament: it seems to me that I need to say as much about the Iliad as I am saying about the Odyssey. She had asked me to submit a brief essay on the Homeric Odyssey that matches another essay, written by Casey Dué, on the Homeric Iliad. That essay (Nagy 2020) appears in World Epics, an on-line site edited by Jo Ann Cavallo, whose own work on comparative epic I very much admire. ![]() But it is based on an even shorter essay that is quite serious in intent. This short essay about the Odyssey of “Homer” is a playful experiment. ![]()
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