An Economic Approach to Homer's Odyssey: Part I

Modeling Homer’s World

In this series, I will use an economic approach to better understand the implicit politics and economics in The Odyssey. As a “naïve” reader with no training in ancient history, I find the comparative treatment of political regimes as one of the most striking features of the narrative, namely that Odysseus visits a considerable number of distinct polities, and experiences each in a different way. How does each regime operate, and how does it differ from the other regimes presented in the book? Economics forces us to boil down those descriptions and comparisons to a relatively small number of variables. Trying to model the polities in Homer’s Odyssey forces us to decide which are their essential, as opposed to accidental features, and what they might have in common, or which are the most important points of contrast.

You don’t have to hold any special loyalty to the economic approach to think this method might be worthwhile. There is an adage that it is better to trade in a liquid market than an illiquid market. Economics is, in intellectual terms, a liquid market. There are a great number of economists, and many people are familiar with the basic modes of economic thought. So, bringing a new approach to Homer is putting an idea out into a relatively active discussion group, analogous to trading in a liquid market. This seems worth trying for Homer, since The Odyssey has received almost zero attention from economists to date.

The economic approach to Homer’s Odyssey also may help us understand both the strength and limitations of economics as a method. How does economics fare when confronted with extremely complex narratives, taken from a very different time and from a culture somewhat removed from the environment in which economics itself originated? To apply a very “liquid” simple method—economics—to a very “liquid” famous and complex text—Homer’s Odyssey—seems like one way to test economics itself.2 Nonetheless, the rational choice approach to Homer still seems relatively underexplored, given the fame and influence of the text itself.3

Below, I define what I mean by an economic approach to Homer. In the next essays, I will consider the politics of the different polities in The Odyssey, applying a comparative perspective.

What does an economic approach to Homer consist of?

The economic approach to human behavior is given many interpretations, most commonly the view that people seek wealth or that people are economically selfish. Or an economic approach may be thought of as unearthing the underlying economic preconditions or circumstances of Homer’s world, or of the worlds he wrote about, or of the real polities which may have corresponded to his narrative treatments.

Those are interesting approaches, but I intend something more general and more methodological, namely I define an economic approach in terms of modeling. If we take a situation, or for that matter a text, and divide up its information into “claims about preferences” and “claims about prices and constraints,” then, in my view, we are starting to build an economic model. Basic microeconomic models classify situations into more primitive or fundamental claims about preferences and constraints, and then they take those categorizations and see if the currently available toolbox of models—also defined in terms of both preferences and constraints—might apply to them.

To be clear, this methodological approach involves a minimum of ontological commitment. It does not require that people are “actually rational” in any instrumental sense, nor does it require that individuals fully understand the constraints they face. Instead, the economic method, as stipulated here, is best thought of as a means of generating new hypotheses and testing old ones.

To compare Homer’s Odyssey to simple neoclassical economic models, let us consider some of the claims about preferences and constraints typically made by mainstream economics:

• 1. Humans maximize their utility in a rational manner.

• 2. Humans care about goods other than just wealth, but in many market settings, wealth or profit maximization is a sufficient stand-in for utility maximization.

• 3. Humans are forward-looking and they will trade transparently with others if the marketplace is sufficiently liquid.

In the world(s) of Homer’s Odyssey, in contrast, the assumptions about human behavior are different. In general terms I think of the core assumptions as looking more like the following:

• 1. Humans pursue quests rather than consumption as traditionally defined.

• 2. Humans are continually deceiving others and indeed often themselves. Gains from economic trade are scant, but the risk of death or imprisonment is high.

• 3. Humans seek out states of intoxication.

Under the economic approach I am proposing, you can think of Homer’s Odyssey as what happens when you inject assumptions along the above lines (with some qualifiers) into a variety of settings. We will end up with a new take on what traditional economics is missing, and more practically, how we might understand real world polities and the political options before us.4

The mode of The Odyssey is striking in yet another way: the world is mostly “deglobalized.” That is, the different polities have virtually no contact with each other, or at least no such contact is shown, at least apart from the travels of Odysseus and his men. It is truly a world of separate islands and societies. The gods go everywhere, as they wish; Odysseus and his men are “global” travelers, but the societies themselves are held apart. A major instance of cross-societal contact, of course, is presented in The Iliad, namely the struggle between Sparta and Troy, and that is a brutal, destructive war. The suitors visiting Penelope and living in the house of Odysseus are another example of cross-cultural contact, and this is mainly a mix of coercion and plundering. In any case, the deglobalization helps us view each society in plain stand-alone terms.5

Let us now turn to the model of human behavior presented in The Odyssey, again noting that I see the key assumptions as humans pursue quests, most live in poverty with a high risk of death or imprisonment, and humans seek out intoxication.

Quests and the poverty of the material world

The most straightforward quest in the story is that of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus. Superficially, the travels of Telemachus to Pylos and Sparta are a quest to discover information about his father, but arguably he also wishes to mature and become strong enough to repel the suitors from his household.

The major quest surrounding the entire story, and of The Iliad as well, is the quest of the Achaeans to recover Helen for Sparta and Menelaus, and as that story progresses, the desire for revenge and glory. By the time we reach The Odyssey, it is obvious that these struggles have not paid off in terms of material self-interest or physical security. Many of the fighters are dead or condemned to long periods of wandering, unable to reach home in any simple way.

It is a more complex question how we should think about Odysseus himself, but for a start I reject the common portrait of Odysseus as the master manager and manipulator par excellence. It is true that he succeeds in returning home and exacting revenge on the suitors, but consider the costs along the way. He faces death numerous times, and it takes him twenty years to return. Worse yet, he loses most of his men along the way. The Ciconians, the Cyclopes, Scylla, and the Lastrygonians all kill some of Odysseus’ men, with the Lastrygonians destroying eleven of his twelve ships with all their crew [10: 112-132]. That hardly seems like managerial excellence, and in these narratives, Odysseus is at least partially at fault for the outcomes, if only because he did not beat a more rapid hurry back home. Just consider the take of Eurylochus on the Cyclopes episode: “Remember what the Cyclops did? Our friends went to his home with this rash lord of ours [Odysseus]. Because of his bad choices, they all died.” [10: 437-439]. It is hard to argue with that, and Odysseus himself realizes he made a big mistake [9: 227-228].6

Instead, I think of Odysseus as seeking knowledge and variety through a quest, even at the possible expense of practical consequences. His initial participation in the Trojan War can be thought of as a quest for victory and glory, and his later time spent wandering around to the different locales of The Odyssey morphs into a quest of a different kind, namely knowledge and self-knowledge. While there are plenty of passages where Odysseus expresses a strong desire to simply return home as soon as possible, a broader look at the story belies “return” as a simple account of his main motive. Odysseus, for all his talk about wanting to get home, often seems quite content to linger, to compete in Olympic games, to make love to Circe, and in general to explore the diversity and strange wonders of the worlds surrounding him. Once he is away from the moorings of either home or having to lead his men in combat, well… the resulting adventures seem pretty interesting. Indeed, that is part of what has made The Odyssey such a compelling tale. The actual desires of Odysseus seem ambiguous, a bit reminiscent of a possible St. Augustine paraphrase: “let me return home, just not yet.” It is perhaps Tennyson, in his poem “Ulysses”, who understands this side of Odysseus best.7

Odysseus is always looking to broaden his experiences. When Odysseus is on Aeolus, he doesn’t seem much to mind being trapped. He goes to bed with the beautiful Circe, albeit under the condition that she swears an oath that she will no longer make plans to hurt him [10:336-348]. At one point in the book, Odysseus even suggests that the men stay with Circe, “eating and drinking,” with “food enough to last forever” [10: 423-428; the men rebel against this suggestion]. Odysseus just doesn’t seem like a loyal guy who wants to get home to his home and wife, but rather he is a wanderer and curiosity-seeker. It is noteworthy that when it comes to the Sirens, Odysseus is indeed keen to hear the song and learn its nature, so rather than stuffing his ears with wax—the treatment for his men—he leaves his ears open and ties himself to the mast.8

Odysseus in fact never makes it back to Ithaca through his own volition. In Book 13 he is talking with the Phaeacians when he simply vanishes, and without any explicit intermediate travel, wakes up in Ithaca. There is an implication that this was the work of the goddess Pallas Athena [13; 160-193]. So, for all his talk, in the final analysis Odysseus was not the active agent of his return. And when Odysseus is leaving Circe, that might be an ideal time for him to return home or at least try to. But no, Homer reports to his men that Circe instructed him to go to the “house of Hades and Persephone” [10: 562-567]

In Book 13 we are reminded that Odysseus is not exactly bursting with desire to see his wife. Pallas Athena tells Odysseus that an ordinary man would immediately rush home to see his wife and children, after the long trip he undertook. She tells Odysseus that he did not even ask about them at first, and he was suspicious, feeling the need to first test his wife [13: 332-337]. On several additional occasions Odysseus details his restlessness and his lack of attention to home and also Penelope.

The account of Odysseus given by Odysseus-in-disguise, after his return to Ithaca, raises further doubts about the motives of Odysseus. Since Odysseus is talking in disguise, this is just a fictional account, designed to mislead, or is it? Odysseus narrates his own story, and he suggests that he deliberately sought a trip to Egypt, “with some pirates” [17: 420-446] to gather treasure, and he notes that along the way he and his men killed many people, until they were upended by Zeus. Earlier, Odysseus-in-disguise had told a comparable tale to Eumaeus the swineherd, when he mentioned that he had been safely at home with his children and wife and possessions after the Trojan War, but that, “Some impulse made me want to sail to Egypt, with nine ships and a godlike crew.” [14: 244-245] Again, we probably are not supposed to take that narrative literally, and Odysseus-in-disguise is trying to give an account of his movements while hiding his identity from Eumaeus. There is yet a third time when Odysseus describes his own motives, and that is when Odysseus-in-disguise is narrating his story, and his story of encountering Odysseus, to Penelope on Ithaca. When it comes to the encounter of Odysseus with the Phaeacians, Odysseus-in-disguise offers this account: “They honored him as if he were a god himself, and gave him abundant gifts, and tried to send him home safely. He would have been here long ago, but he decided he should travel more and gather greater wealth. No man on earth knows better how to make a profit.” [19: 280-286] The point here is not to accept all those stories as true accounts of the motives of Odysseus, but rather to see Homer as raising additional doubts about those motives. Do note that once Odysseus finally does return home, the first thing he tells Penelope is that he may need to leave home again, to make sacrifices to Poseidon [23: 248-280].9

Finally, compare Odysseus and Menelaus. Menelaus narrates how he was lost at sea for eight years, traveling through Cyprus, Phoenicia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Sidon and Araby, and Libya, seeking to accumulate wealth. He notes that someone entered his kingdom and killed his brother, who was betrayed by his scheming wife [4: 82-92]. After various sorrows and tales are exchanged, Menelaus winds back to how he returned home [4: 349 and onwards]. At first the gods prevented his exit, just as was the case with Odysseus, again a deliberate parallel. But Menelaus works very hard to make the proper sacrifices to the gods, and to learn what those sacrifices have to be. After considerable effort and machinations, and after Menelaus had “quenched the anger of the gods,” “The gods at last gave me fair wind, and sent me quickly home.” [4: 583-586]. The contrast with Odysseus could not be more marked, the implication being that Odysseus ultimately chose to dally outside his polity for as long as he did. The King who wanted to return comes back to order, whereas Odysseus ceded control of his household.

In the consolidated story, across the two Homerian epics, Nestor, Diomedes, Idomeneus, Agamemnon, and Menelaus all eschewed the long-term wandering path of Odysseus. For instance, when Telemachus visits Pylos, Nestor is at home with his wife and apparently securely in command of his polity. Odysseus is still off wandering and unable to find his way home.10

So how should we imagine Odysseus? Maybe he is a variety-seeker, a love and sex-seeker, a wealth-seeker, a fighter, a glory-seeker, a master manipulator, and also someone who at times wishes to return home and seek vengeance, restoring Ithaca to its proper place. When he presents himself as simply wishing to return home, it is hard to tell if he is deceiving only others or also deceiving himself. In any case, the nature of his quest is a complex one, and he acts as if he is restless, and values discovery above homecoming, at least for most of the choices he makes.

If there is any economic model for the consumption of Odysseus (but not the other characters more generally), it is one of high intertemporal substitution combined with low habit formation, or more prosaically, an extreme curiosity of temporarily intense sampling. That means a lot of one particular thing now (including intoxication, discussed below), and then later on a great deal of something else quite different. Those other goods can include warfare, family life, and travel. The life as a whole is varied and diverse, but most of the individual moments are quite specialized. Among its other insights, The Odyssey is a case study of what such a life would be like, how daunting it would be, how destructive it could be, and how few humans would be well-suited for such an existence.11

The economics of intoxication

Economic historians disagree about the exact living standards during both Homer’s time and the earlier time he wrote about, but per capita incomes could not have been very high. Most technological revolutions had yet to happen, and opportunities for material accumulation were correspondingly limited, even for relatively wealthy people. Yet intoxicating substances, and of a wide variety, were commonly present. Wine is the most obvious example, but there are enough references to drugs in The Odyssey that intoxication can be seen as one of the major themes.

One of the most important economic decisions a person could make was whether to become intoxicated, and which medium to choose for the intoxication. For those above subsistence and below kingship, there may not have been so many other consumption decisions which so influenced happiness, whether positively or negatively. Intoxication may have been the consumption decision number one for a significant portion of society.

I am reminded of the one poor society I know best, a Mexican village called San Agustin Oapan, where I once did fieldwork. It seemed to me, and this was corroborated by a resident anthropologist, that the rate of male alcoholism there was about fifty percent. Although the resident population was only about 1500, not a day went by when you didn’t see a drunk person passed out in the street. Alcoholism and intoxication are common themes in other poor communities too, and a lot of wealthier ones. We don’t have direct evidence about the rate and degree of intoxication in Homer’s time, but you can take The Odyssey as indirect evidence that intoxication likely was a significant phenomenon.

Our knowledge of intoxicating substances in Homer’s time is partial, but there was wine, poppy-related substances, intoxicating plants, and wine often was infused with further intoxicating substances—the compound pharmacy so to speak (Rinella 2010). Furthermore, the wine of that time may have been much more potent than the modern versions we buy in the supermarket. When Helen pours drugged wine at the evening festival with Telemachus and Nestor, we are told it will take “all pain and rage away.” [4:221] The wine is mixed with “powerful magic drugs,” from the fertile fields of Egypt [4: 228-230].

If you doubt the potential value of intoxication, consider the alternatives as presented by the voyages of Odysseus. He confronts numerous chances to have a bewitched, drugged, or drunk life, mostly under fairly pleasant circumstances (Calypso, Circe, the Sirens, and arguably the choice he faces to remain in Scheria). He may enjoy those situations for some time, but eventually, he opts for the long and dangerous journey back home, where he then faces a dangerous confrontation with suitors. Odysseus’s journey is often described as one of temptation, but it is less commonly emphasized that most of all he is faced with the temptation of various intoxications (Rinelli 2010, pp.74-76).

Odysseus is the one character who can overcome or at least avoid falling into these temptations, and it is striking how Circe describes him: “I am amazed that you could drink my potion and yet not be bewitched. No other man has drunk it and withstood the magic charm. But you are different. Your mind is not enchanted. You must be Odysseus, the man who can adapt to anything.” [10: 326-331] This is consistent with the above description of Odysseus as a man who is addicted to change and the variety of exploration, an intoxication greater than what any particular drug can offer him, because those drugs would indeed bring his journeys to a final end. It is not obvious that all of Odysseus’s men would make the same choice, and often he is the one organizing the escape or deciding that his crew must not allow itself to be lured by the song of the sirens into a blissful indifference to worldly fates.

The ultimate encounter with intoxication is of course the experience with the Sirens, “who bewitch all passersby,” and “will seduce him with piercing songs.” The songs are so compelling that men will end up as dead, rotting flesh, as they enjoy the songs at the expense of all other ends [12: 38-50]. There is no defense against their lure, other than to be bound to the mast and to have one’s ears plugged with wax, so that the songs simply are not heard. In that case “just a little intoxication” is not an option, and the song of the Sirens must be abjured altogether. The one who listens to the song, however, is Odysseus, who does not stuff his ears with wax, though he is bound to the mast [12: 192-200].

The Cyclops is an example of a creature unable to resist the lure of intoxication, and to his eventual detriment. Odysseus is able to escape, in part, because he manages to get the Cyclops drunk, and the end result is that the Cyclops has a sharp burning stick thrust into his remaining eye. Odysseus’s men face the lure of the sirens, and their song, and we never quite learn just how horrible or pleasant a fate that is going to be. Odysseus turns it down, as he knows it is forever and feels a greater need to keep on moving.

In essence, the intoxication theme is reading Homer through Aldous Huxley, in particular Huxley’s Brave New World. In Huxley’s imagined dystopia, people drug themselves to feel better, when their basic material needs already have been met, so what else is there to do? That might sound like the opposite of Homer’s world, but the emphasis of economics on marginal decisions indicates those apparent opposites may be pretty close after all. Both are instances of “intoxicate because you can’t do any better at the margin,” admittedly at very different absolute levels of consumption and comfort. At very low and very high levels of consumption, if marginal work effort does not yield much, the intoxication decision can be central to economic reasoning.

In my next piece, I will turn from this sort of economic modeling of the tale of The Odyssey and to the variety of polities explored in the epic. From these descriptions, we can search for more even more lessons for political economy today.

References

Ahrensdorf, Peter J. Homer on the Gods & Human Virtue: Creating the Foundations of Classical Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Alvis, John. Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1995.

Aronen, Jaakko. “Genealogy as a Form of Mythic Discourse. The Case of the Phaeacians.” 2002, 89-110.

Bresson, Alain. The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States.

Cowen, Tyler. “Is a Novel a Model?” In The Street Porter and the Philosopher: Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism, edited by Sandra Peart and David M. Levy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008, 319-337.

Dobbs, Darrell. “Reckless Rationalism and Heroic Reverence in Homer’s Odyssey.” American Political Science Review, June 1987, 81, 2, 491-508.

Dodds, E.R. The Greeks and the Irrational. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Dougherty, Carol. The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Germain, Gabriel. “The Sirens and the Temptation of Knowledge.” In Homer: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by George Steiner and Robert Fagles. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1962, 91-97.

Kearns, Emily. “The Gods in the Homeric Epics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Homer, edited by Robert Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 59-73.

Levy, David. The Economic Ideas of Ordinary People: From Preferences to Trade. London: Routledge, 2011.

Louden, Bruce. “An Extended Narrative Pattern in the Odyssey.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies, 1993.

Osborne, Robin. “Homer’s Society.” In The Cambridge Companion to Homer, edited by Robert Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 206-219.

Raaflaub, Kurt A. “Poets, lawgivers, and the beginnings of political reflection in Archaic Greece.” In The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.23-59.

Redfield, James M. “The Economic Man.” In Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Homer’s Odyssey, edited by Lillian E. Doherty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.265-287.

Rinella, Michael A. Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010.

Rose, Gilbert P. “The Unfriendly Phaeacians.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Society, 1969, 100, 387-406.

Schmiel, Robert. “Telemachus in Sparta.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association.” 1972, 103, 463-472.

Scully, Stephen. Homer and the Sacred City. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Seaford, Richard. Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Segal, Charles. Singers, Heroes, and Gods in The Odyssey. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994.

Whittaker, Helène. “The Status of Arete in the Phaeacian Episode of The Odyssey.” Symbolae Osloenses, 1999, 74, 140-150.

Footnotes

[1] Available at the Online Library of Liberty: The Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer, translated by Thomas Hobbes.

Available for purchase: The Odyssey, by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles at Amazon.com.

[2] Of course, this is not the first attempt to view Homer through a rational choice lens. Dobbs (1987) considers the Odyssey as a critique of political rationalism. Seaford (1987) considers both The Iliad and The Odyssey as narratives of a breakdown of “redistributive reciprocity,” in both cases leading to conflict, and Segal (1994) considers themes of reciprocal gift exchange in The Odyssey. Redfield (2009) considers the “economic ethic” in Homer. Levy (2011) considers Homer through the lens of history of economic thought. More generally, Cowen (2008) considers how we might read novels and other works of fiction as implicit models about characters and their interaction.

[3] On the ancient Greek economy, including Mycenaean times, see Bresson (2016).

[4] On the specific notion of “polis” in Homer, see Scully (1990) and also Raaflaub (2000) has some interesting remarks.

[5] Strikingly, Homer’s own time was one of growing cross-cultural contact and “globalization,” as discussed by Dougherty (2001), but also one of political fragmentation Bresson (2016, pp.101-102). On the earlier deglobalization of Mycenaean society, starting around 1200 BC and extending for perhaps four centuries, see Osborne (2004).

[6] See Ahrensdorf (2014, pp.206-209) for a further development of this theme, including the question of how much Odysseus blamed the men themselves for their disastrous fate. To be sure, there is plenty of rational calculation in The Odyssey, most of all from Odysseus. For instance, in book 7, when Odysseus is visiting the Phaeacians, over the succession of a mere few pages we are told he spoke “with careful calculation” [7: 206], or he answered “Planning his words with careful skill…” [7: 240], or he replied to the King “With careful tact” [7: 302]. Nonetheless procedural rationality, when combined with unusual preferences, will not always rebound to the social good.

[7] On this theme, see also Alvis (1995, chapter two).

[8] For this point on the Sirens, see Germain (1962, p.92).

[9] You don’t have to believe any one of those accounts as the “real story” of Odysseus or the real account of his motives. Nonetheless the broader implication is that there are numerous stories of the wandering of Odysseus, not all of them have him as a heroic victim, and we also should not unconditionally privilege the particular account served up in the Odyssey either. When it comes to the motives of Odysseus, Odysseus-in-disguise should not be discounted entirely.

[10] See Ahrensdorf (2014, pp.216-223).

[11] For a discussion of some related kinds of preferences, see Elster (1979, 1982). For a general treatment of “the irrational” in Greek thought, see Dodds (1971).