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we can do is to attribute this diversity of fantasy styles to that fusion of traditions of different origin which were handed down by the ancient bards and came together in Homer’s poem. The most archaic level of narrative would thus be in Ulysses’ first-person account of his adventures.
    Most archaic? According to Alfred Heubeck the opposite might have been the case. (See Omero,
Odissea
, Libri I-IV, introduction by Alfred Heubeck, text and commentary by Stephanie West (Milan: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla/Mondadori, 1981).)
    Ulysses had always been an epic hero, even before
The Odyssey
(and also before
The Iliad)
, and epic heroes, such as Achilles and Hector in
The Iliad
, do not have folktale adventures of that type with monsters and magic spells. But the author of
The Odyssey
has to have Ulysses absent from home for ten years: as far as his family and former comrades in arms are concerned he has vanished and can no longer be found. To do this he has to make him disappear from the known world, to cross over into another geographical space, into a world beyond the human one, into the Beyond (not for nothing do his travels culminate in a visit to the Underworld). For this voyage beyond the bounds of the epic the author of
The Odyssey
turns to traditions (which certainly are more archaic) such as the deeds of Jason and the Argonauts.
    So the novelty of
The Odyssey
resides in having an epic hero like Ulysses pitted against ‘witches and giants, monsters and eaters of men’, that is in situations that belong to a more archaic kind of saga, whose roots are to be found ‘in the world of ancient fable, and even in the world of primitive magic and Shamans’.
    It is in this that the author of
The Odyssey
shows us, according to Heubeck, his true modernity, which makes him seem close to us, even our contemporary: if traditionally the epic hero had been a paradigm of aristocratic, military virtues, Ulysses is all these things but in addition he is the man who withstands the harshest of experiences, labours, pain, solitude. ‘Certainly he too carries his audience into a mythical world of dreams, but this dream world becomes at the same time the mirror image of the real world in which we all live and which is pervaded by need and anguish, terror and pain, and in which man is immersed without escape.’
    In this same volume Stephanie West, though she starts from entirely different premisses from Heubeck, ventures a hypothesis that would appear to confirm his argument: the hypothesis that there was an alternative
Odyssey
, another journey of return, preceding Homer’s. Homer (or whoever the author of
The Odyssey
was), she argues, finding this tale of voyages too thin and pointless, replaced it with the fabulous adventures, but preserved traces of the earlier version in the account of the disguised Cretan. And in fact in the opening lines there is one verse which ought to epitomise the whole of the poem: ‘He saw the cities and came to know the thoughts of many men.’ What cities? What thoughts? This line seems to apply more to the voyages of the false Cretan …
    However, as soon as Penelope has identified her husband in the bedroom which he has now repossessed, Ulysses starts talking again of the Cyclops, the Sirens … Perhaps
The Odyssey
is the myth of all voyages? Perhaps for Ulysses-Homer the distinction between truth and falsehood did not exist; he simply recounted the same experience now in the language of reality, now in the language of myth, just as for us even today each journey we undertake, big or small, is still an
Odyssey
.
    [1983]

Xenophon’s
Anabasis
    Reading Xenophon’s
Anabasis
today is the nearest thing to watching an old war documentary which is repeated every so often on television or on video. The same fascination that we experience when watching the black and white of a faded film, with its rather crude contrasts of light and shade and speeded-up movements, emerges almost spontaneously from passages such as