Strange Women Lying in Ponds

The most fascinating part of the Odyssey to me is the Cretan Lie. When you think of the Odyssey, the first thing you picture is probably Odysseus’s run-ins with famous monsters. The Cyclopes, the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, etc. But there’s a reading of the Odyssey in which none of these events took place, and a far more historically intriguing sequence of events emerges. For one, we don’t actually ‘see’ the run-ins with the monsters take place in the poem. Instead, these details all come from Odysseus’s own narration to the Phaeacians. They’re part of the story he tells them of his travels to convince them to charter a fleet to send him back home to Ithaca. The problem is, Odysseus is a liar. He lies constantly, any time he pops up in Greek mythology. In fact, in the Odyssey he tells many different people many different versions of what he did after Troy. And why would he tell the Phaeacians the truth? He wouldn’t, of course. He would tell them whatever he thought they wanted to hear. To me, the most intriguing version of events he tells is to his loyal swine herd. While still in disguise pretending to be a Cretan, Odysseus says that after the sacking of Troy, he led his men on an expedition against the Egyptians. But his expedition failed. His men were all killed or enslaved by the Egyptians. But he threw himself at the Pharaoh’s feet and begged for mercy. He received it, and spent 7 years in Egypt, where he amassed great riches, before being tricked and nearly sold into slavery in Phoenicia, but then surviving a shipwreck and making his way back to Ithaca. We know the Trojan War would’ve taken place during the same period that the Sea People were sacking their way down the coast of Anatolia (where Troy was) to Egypt, where Ramses III ultimately defeats them. This matches up perfectly with Odysseus’s ‘lie.’ I like to think that Odysseus saved the most honest version of his travels for his most loyal servant (though still cloaked in a lie, as Odysseus’s stories always are). And that Homer has preserved more about the Bronze Age collapse than we’ve ever given him credit for.