Odysseus and a Phoenician Tale

Abstract

The question of the authorship of the two Homeric epics — whether there was one Homer, or two — has vexed scholars since the inception of critical literary study. The more bellicose, less inner and mysterious Iliad was by far the more popular poem in antiquity. And although the later Aeneid of Virgil tendentiously fuses together war and nostos (homecoming), it is of arms and a man, not a man of many ways and wiles, that the Roman poet sings. Odysseus is likened, invidiously, to a Canaanite (Phoenician) traveling merchant in his flexibility and adaptability — he, the “rootless cosmopolitan” of his remote age, resonates with the predicament of alienation of modern man and with the psychological depth of the modern literary sensibility, then bellicose, candid, limited Achilles and Aeneas. It is proposed in the article that the Odyssey employs the topos of a man traveling in search of lost members of his family, with a happy resolution, that seems indeed to have been peculiarly popular over many centuries with Phoenicians and Carthaginians. The author suggests indeed that Menaechmus, the name of a character in a play based on this topos with a Punic setting that might even have been performed, in a Northwest Semitic translation in Qart Ḥadašt (Newtown, i.e., Carthage) itself, is merely the very common Hebrew name Menachem. And it is noted that the topos recurs, employed in aid of religious propaganda of the Jewish Christians, in the setting of the PseudoClementine Recognitions.