Homer's Odyssey and the Near East.

• Author: Teffeteller, Annette
• Position: Book review

Homer's Odyssey and the Near East. By BRUCE LOUDEN. Cambridge: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. Pp. vii + 356. $99.

Near Eastern influences on Greek culture, once denied or simply overlooked, are now the subject of a flourishing field of scholarship, major works ranging from Walter Burkert's early and justly celebrated Die orientalisierende Epoche in der griechischen Religion und Literatur in 1984 to the virtual encyclopedia of parallels, influences, and (the more neutral) "antecedents" presented in 1997 by Martin West in the felicitously titled The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, bearing incontrovertible witness to the author's famous statement, made half a century ago and prescient for its time, that "Greece is part of Asia; Greek literature is a Near Eastern literature" (West 1966: 31). It is in fact a sobering thought that we have no certain knowledge of Greek poetry or myth (indeed, given the ambiguities of the archaeological record, of Greek culture generally) prior to the contact of the Greeks with Near Eastern cultures, documented from the mid-second millennium and perhaps begun long before that.

Within the broader world of Near Eastern poetry and myth, parallels between Homeric poetry and biblical themes and motifs have long been noticed (e.g., Krenkel 1888; Burr 1887; and already in the mid-seventeenth century, Bogan 1658; all cited by West 1997). In this tradition Bruce Louden's comparison of the Odyssey with Near Eastern literature and myth focuses primarily on parallels with the Old Testament. Thirteen chapters treat parallels in the areas of divine councils, theoxeny, romance, spies and the women who help them, wrestling with gods, creation myth, Argonautic myth, sea-monsters and fantastic voyages, combat myths, catabasis, rebellious followers, the depiction of impious men in wisdom literature, the return of the king--unrecognized and abused, and "contained" apocalypse.

Details of three chapters will give some sense of the approach and scope of the work. Chapter one on divine councils and apocalyptic myth surveys councils of the sky father with either a mentor god or a wrathful god, the first exemplified in, among others, the divine council that opens the Odyssey, the council of El and Baal in the Ugaritic Aqhat, and Enkidu's dream of a divine council in Gil-gamesh. Wrathful gods seen in council include the Odyssey's Poseidon and Helios, the spurned Ishtar in Gilgamesh, and Satan in the Book of Job. "It is not often realized," Louden comments (p. 23)...