Kleos and its Ironies in the Odyssey

Abstract

This study of the role of kleos, heroic fame, in the Odyssey attempts to relate the anomalies in Odysseus' heroism to the poem's self-consciousness about the epic singer and his song. This hero wins by guile rather than force, conceals rather than proclaims his name, and in describing his own deeds as past events already fixed as heroic tradition sings of his own kleos, like a bard. His narration to the Phaeacians, his meeting with the Cyclops, and his restoration of festive song as at a wedding near the end of the poem offer different models for the social function of song and memory. The immobility and putrefaction associated with the Sirens are a negation of the vital power of epic kleos to reach between living and dead. In book XXIII Odysseus not only creates (or re-creates) kleos in words, like a bard, but once more wins kleos as a hero who performs great deeds. Even here, however, the unheroic elements, stressed in the second Nekyia, leave Odysseus' kleos surrounded by ambiguities and paradoxes.

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