                           20050216.01

     I confess I haven't finished reading the Odyssey yet.
Because I try to read it in the original, it takes me a long
time.

     From what I have read, I am impressed with the description
of Odysseus as the perfect family man, Penelope as the perfect
wife, and Telemachus as the perfect son. There is also the
perfect nurse-maid, - was her name Eurycleia? All in all, the
Odyssey seems to me very modern in its depiction of Family Values
in an Ownership society. After all, the charge against Penelope's
suitors is not that they competed for the hand of a presumed
widow, but that they wasted the substance of the family estate.

     Odysseus resists the seductions not only of the sirens and
of Calypso, but he remains unmoved also by the modest beauty of
Nausikaa. Compare Odysseus' unwavering loyalty to his Penelope,
with the philandering of Zeus himself.

     Of particular interest is the council of the gods in the
first book of the Odyssey,  where Athena brings up the matter of
Odysseus and pleads for him as a blameless man unjustly punished.
In this context, note the remarkable justification of human
suffering, to the effect that men (and women) bring suffering on
themselves by their folly.  The converse, of course, is that by
"taking thought", man can avoid or escape destruction: that is
the obvious moral of the Odyssee with its shrewd and wise hero,
who, unlike his unfortunate comrades, who perish because they
kill the cattle that belong to the gods, - again the ownership
society, -survives and returns home because of his shrewdness,
which is piety, respect for the gods and their property.

     Compare the Greek notion of salvation as the exercise of
reason, with the Hebrew concept of salvation through obedience to
the Law, and the Christian concept of salvation as redemption
from original sin through faith.

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