The Odyssey Writing Style

Clear, Poetic

OK, now we know what you’re thinking: how could we possibly think the language of the Odyssey is clear? When you start reading Homer, you’re probably going to think his way of saying things is pretty weird and formal – at any rate, far from clear. (We know because we sure felt this way our first time picking it up.) The thing is, you have to look at Homeric style as a little bit like learning a new dialect. It won’t take you long to get the hang of it – maybe the first few books or so – but once you do, you’re home free, because it falls into a very regular pattern, with a lot of repetitions. Once you get past the initial strangeness, you’ll see that Homer's work is almost never complicated for its own sake. He just says things in a very clear and direct way – in his own distinctive language.

Homeric Simile

As for our calling it poetic, we know this might just seem redundant. It is a poem after all. But because of that, it’s important to recognize the distinctive features of Homer’s poetic style. Probably the most famous of these is the so-called “Homeric simile.” A simile, in case you don’t remember, is a way of describing something by explicitly comparing it to something else: “A is like B.” Homer’s distinctive way of making similes comes up more often in the Iliad than the Odyssey, but there are still some famous examples of it spicing up Odysseus’s (already very spicy) adventures.

One famous example appears in Book VI, lines 130-136. It follows the three-step process of your typical Homeric simile: 1) saying what it is that whatever you’re talking about is like (in this case, Odysseus is like a lion); 2) describing the thing you’re comparing it to (the lion); and 3) reminding the audience of what you were originally talking about (Odysseus). The third step is important because sometimes the description the second step can get extremely long, and there’s the risk that the audience will forget what you’re talking about.

Dactylic Hexameter

The final important thing we should point out in Homer’s style is his meter: the tongue-twisting “dactylic hexameter.” Try saying that five times fast. Or wait, make that six times. Why six times? Well, here’s the deal. Even though they look like syllable soup, the two words “dactylic” and “hexameter” actually mean something. Just to be tricky, let’s start with “hexameter.”

The “hex” in “hexameter” is the same as in “hexagon,” which you might remember is a six-sided shape. And the “meter” part is like…well, “meter,” a unit of measurement. So a “hexameter” is a poetic meter with six measures. (We’re using “measures” here in the musical sense, meaning the same thing as “bars.”) Because measures or bars in poetry are known as feet, you might as well just translate “hexameter” as “six feet.”

OK, but what about the “dactylic” part? This comes from the Greek word “daktylos,” which means “finger.” We might as well just translate “dactylic” as “fingery.” So far so good? Good. Now take a look at your finger – any finger except for your thumb. You will probably notice that it has one long joint followed by two short joints. That’s the basic idea the Greeks were trying to get across in calling this meter dactylic – are you ready for this? It’s made up of FEET that are shaped like FINGERS: one long syllable followed by two short syllables.

From what we’ve already learned about the word “hexameter,” can you guess how many of such feet are going to be in a line? If you guessed “six,” give yourself a pat on the back: you are almost completely right. Why “almost”? That’s because, in dactylic hexameter, only the first five feet are shaped like fingers (LONG + short + short); the last foot is never shaped this way; it will be either: (LONG + LONG) or (LONG + short). To illustrate this meter in action, let’s just take our handy-dandy translations, “fingery” (LONG + short + short) and “six feet” (LONG-short):

“Fingery | fingery | fingery | fingery | fingery | six-feet”

Pretty neat, huh? Of course, thousands and thousands of lines in that rhythm would start to get pretty annoying, so the ancients allowed you to plug in a (LONG + LONG) in exchange for any one of the first five feet. (This usually happened in only the first four.) This allowed a wide range of rhythms to achieve a variety of poetic effects and keep things interesting. Unfortunately, this meter does not come through in English translations of the work, though some translations – such as Richmond Lattimore – try to replicate some of its features in their English lines. Other translations, such as Robert Fitzgerald, just switch to the most tried-and-true of English poetic meters: the iambic pentameter.