Paradigms for Odysseus

The poem compares Odysseus with Heracles through shared epithets and exploits (including catabasis and archery), but the Heracles paradigm is discredited by Heracles’ murder of his guest-friend Iphitus. The vignette of Odysseus’ naming by his grandfather, Autolycus, identifies the source of the hero’s ancestral cunning and motivates his visit as a young man to Parnassus, where he kills a boar when hunting with his uncles, thereby effecting his initiation into adulthood. The boar hunt test is the pattern for the bow contest: Odysseus corresponds in each to the marginalized initiation candidate. The lightly armed Odysseus who, like Apollo, kills young men with his arrows gives way in the fight with the suitors to a heavily armed hoplite figure whose divine model is Apollo Delphinios, who at the new moon of the new year presides over the ἀπέλλα‎ (assembly) where young men make the transition into the community of adult men.