E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wine-dark seesaw A classicist’s ‘biography’ of Odysseus BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	Odysseus: A Life By Charles Rowan Beye. Theia/Hyperion, 209 pages, $23.95

The Odyssey — anchor of the literary canon, topic of many a Western-civilization survey lecture — has experienced an active afterlife. Homer’s epic poem chronicling the adventures of Odysseus on his decade-long return home from the Trojan War has sired countless reinterpretations. In poetry, prose, film, scholarship, and drama — from Tennyson’s "Ulysses" to Joyce’s novel, from US poet laureate Louise Glück’s Meadowlands and the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? to novelist Jane Rawlings’s recent Penelopeia (the story retold from Penelope’s perspective) — there’s no lack of perspectives on Odysseus’s twists and turns.

Now Charles Rowan Beye, Distinguished Professor of Classics Emeritus at CUNY, has written a "biography" of the Bronze Age hero. In taking on the life of a fictional character, Beye combines historical fact — the weapons, rituals, customs, clothes, and architecture of the second millennium BCE — with fictional invention, riffing on Odysseus’s own trademark tendency toward crafting identities for himself.

Beye’s Odysseus emerges as consistent with the traditional portrait: cunning, merciless, favored by the gods, respected (but not necessarily liked) by men. "Prince," the first of the slim book’s five chapters, documents his childhood. This section of the hero’s life requires the most imagination on the biographer’s part, and it’s where Beye is most successful. In the Odyssey, Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and encounters the swineherd Eumaeus, who relates how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery and refers to his friendship with Odysseus’s sister. Beye extrapolates a boyhood friendship between Eumaeus and Odysseus, with the slavery story functioning as Odysseus’s first exposure to how precarious and perilous life can be. Back then, "Pirates lurked on the seas in his imagination; they were the menace of change, ripping the weave of innocent and unsuspecting lives. . . . " It’s a compelling, creative, and psychologically revealing way to interpret Odysseus’s life-long wariness and distrust.

At times, however, Beye summarizes the epic more than he sheds new light on Odysseus’s character. Following the narratives of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the author moves through Odysseus’s Trojan War exploits in the "Warrior" chapter and on to his adventures on the sea and encounters with the Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, and Circe, among others, in "Wanderer," then to his sexual escapades with Calypso in "Lover," and finally to his return to his kingdom and wife in "King." Throughout, Athena protects Odysseus, the ancient laws of hospitality are variously abided by and broken, and Odysseus comes off as competent, confident, wily, and weary — just what a close reading of any of the standard English verse translations of the original reveals.

Beye’s prose is light, swift, and conversational, and devices like the occasional extended simile give it a Homeric lilt — those aforementioned menacing pirates fragment lives "like jets of lightning that dart down from the sky to shatter trees." But even if he makes it clear that we’re looking at Odysseus through a 21st-century lens, his language can be jarringly anachronistic. About the nymph Circe, he writes, "One likes to think that Hermes, who perhaps had a good eye for male flesh, had been pimping her for eons." Worse still, "Circe was, he [Odysseus] dimly realized, the woman of his masturbatory fantasies and his wet dreams finally come true." Classical scholars have a tendency to sprinkle their work with contemporary references in an attempt to show how hip they are.

Beye makes much of Odysseus’s cunning, lying, and ability to construct shifting identities depending on the situation. And indeed, making up stories is his hero’s greatest strength. But it is not Beye’s. He rarely ventures beyond paraphrasing the "facts" of the Odyssey, and so psychological insights like the one he offers in his invention of the Eumaeus episode are rare. What could have been a unique novel about the hero reads more like a particularly witty, erudite edition of Cliffs Notes. Back in Ithaca, Athena confronts Odysseus disguised as a shepherd boy, and Odysseus fabricates an elaborate narrative about his life and struggles, doing "what inveterate liars know is essential: creating enough details to make an entire world, which will have the same substance as the real one. This is always the mark, for example, of successful adulterers." It’s also the mark of successful novelists. Beye’s timid retelling falls short of creating a world as real and complete as that of Homer.

Charles Rowan Beye speaks at the Harvard Book Store, 1256 Massachusetts Avenue in Harvard Square, this Tuesday, March 2, at 6 p.m.; call (617) 661-1515.