"Jai guru deva, om"

Italian historical painter Giovanni Battista Castello, better known as Il Bergamasco to avoid confusion with another artist whose name was identical, created this fresco of Odysseus and his son Telemachus and the goddess Pallas Athene and two household servants slaying the "suitors" of his wife, Penelope. The fresco was completed in 1560 at the Villa Pallavicino delle Peschiere in Genoa.

Odysseus: "Believe me, I am no god."

Part 1 of 2

How does one determine "favorites?"

Favorite food, favorite sweater, favorite film, favorite book, favorite anything?

In the instance of books, it is an easy question for me to answer as long as I do not have to mention my all-time, very favorite among all the books I ever have read. I do not think I could do that and I have no desire to try. But, I can easily name the two or three or four which would contend for the title of my ultimate favorite.

Two of them are, "The Odyssey," by the poet Homer and, "Centennial," by novelist and short story writer James Michener.

The determining factor is simple. Many of the books I have read since I was a boy are among those I now own and I write the dates of the reading inside of them (in some cases, educated estimates). Books from libraries are not in the running because if they were fascinating enough for me to want to read them again, I would have bought a copy later. I might add that I seldom buy a book unless I have first read it or know of it from other sources and "admire" it.

Count the number of times I have read a book and you easily can know which are among my favorites.

It also is not unusual for me to own "a few" copies of my favorites and to carry one or more of them with me when I travel. Which brings me back on point.

To offer a snynopsis of Homer's "Odyssey," it is the story of Odysseus (called Ulysses, by some), who is the king of Ithaca and his ten-year journey to return home after the ten-year Trojan War, which took place sometime around 1200 BCE (Before Christian Era).

Along the return journey, Odysseus encounters all manner of obstacles, ranging from the Cyclops Polyphemus, who captures the crew and eats a few; to the song of the Sirens, which cause men to sail their ships onto rocks and destruction; to the spell of the sorceress, Circe, with whom he has two sons; to the idyllic beauty of Nausicaa, and her unrequited love for him; to the charms of the enchantress, Calypso, who keeps him her "prisoner of love" on the island of Ogygia for seven of those ten years.

Upon his return, he finds his palace overrun by wastrel noblemen who are vying for marriage to Penelope, the presumed widow of Odysseus. One of the suitors, Antinous, plans to assassinate the son of Odysseus, Telemachus, eliminating the only opposition to their dominion over the palace

One of the most alluring elements of the tale, to me, is when Penelope tells the suitors she will marry the man among the 108 suitors who can string the bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads. Several try and fail. Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, asks to try and succeeds. Then begins a "wonderful," pitched, revenge battle in which Odysseus, Telemachus, two servants and the goddess, Pallas Athene, disguised as Mentor, a family friend, kill all but two of the suitors.

Odysseus and Penelope later adjourn to their "bridal bed" which, reminiscent of "tree of life" mythology, is made from an olive tree around which the house is built.

Troy was a city located in antiquity in what was then known as Asia Minor, now as Anatolia in modern Turkey, just south of the Dardanelles strait. It was destroyed by a Greek army about 1200 BCE. It was during this war that Achilles met his death. The city ruins were found by a German businessman and archaeologist named Heinrich Schliemann during excavations in the 1870s.

The two epic poems surrounding the Trojan War and the travails of Odysseus are, "The Illiad," and "The Odyssey," written in the late seventh or the early eighth century by a blind, Ionian named Homer. Homeric Greek shows features of multiple regional Greek dialects and periods, but is fundamentally based on Ionic Greek, in keeping with the tradition that Homer was from Ionia.

Since there is a gap of a few hundred years between the Trojan War the appearance of the Homeric epics, similar questions mark the legitimacy of Homer's work as do the works of William Shakespeare, which is to say there is debate about how long the stories had been in existence before these authors produced them in writing.

The oldest version I have of, "The Odyssey," is the E.V. Rieu translation published in January 1946. A significantly older "edition" of the story exists.

This has been another lengthy and rather poorly written episode in my never-ending quest to bore you and put you to sleep. It is something like the fourth or fifth or sixth post in which Odysseus has been a "key player." Stay tuned for many more of the same ....

Before that or them or those or whatever, however, Part 2 of this segment focusing upon a "sort of old" edition of Homer's "Odyssey" will appear in another day or two or three or whatever .... it will be a piece published in Archaeology magazine and written by Daniel Weiss, a senior editor at that publication. Rather than attempt a rewrite of the Weiss piece, I will simply run it as it appeared in the magazine.

To be continued ....