One is the story of Odysseus who is held captive on Ogygia by Calypso. Almost immediately, he delineates two plots that eventually will merge.
Homer uses the epic's opening to introduce the plot, the theme, and the characters of the work. She predicts that his father will return and insists that the prince must stand up to the suitors and seek more information about Odysseus. She suggests that Zeus dispatch Hermes to liberate Odysseus from Calypso while Athena visits Ithaca to advise King Odysseus' son, Telemachus.ĭisguised as Mentes, an old friend of Odysseus, Athena counsels Telemachus. Meanwhile, Odysseus' wife, Penelope, is besieged by suitors at his home in Ithaca.Īt a divine council on Mount Olympus, Athena pleads with her father, Zeus, to take pity on Odysseus and allow him to return home. Odysseus has incurred the wrath of Poseidon, god of the sea, by blinding his son Polyphemus the Cyclops. He is being held captive on the island Ogygia by the "bewitching nymph" (1.17) Calypso who wants him for her husband. Odysseus, the reader is told, is the only Greek survivor of the Trojan War who has not yet returned home or died trying. For Virgil, too, 'delays' his opening invocation in the Aeneid, where it only occurs eight lines into the first book (), where Homer's two epics both open with invocations in their very first lines.Homer opens The Odyssey with an invocation to the Muse of epic poetry and asks for her guidance in telling the story of a man who has experienced many twists and turns of fate and has suffered many hardships. What perhaps has not drawn notice is that, in a sense, he is 'outdoing' Virgil in this as well. That Dante has 'delayed' his invocation has caused notice. They are present as follows:, ,, ,, ,,. (For only the latest miscount see Merc.1998.1). It is curious that few commentators have noted the fact that there are, in fact, nine invocations (and only nine) in the poem. For perhaps the first reckoning that accounts for all nine invocations see Fabb.1910.1.
It is, given Dante's fondness for the number of Beatrice, nine, difficult to believe that the fact that there are nine invocations in the poem may be accidental (see Holl.1976.2). For a study of the meaning of the word ingegno in its 27 appearances (twice as the verb ingegnare) in the What he does need is conceptual and expressive power, alto ingegno and the arte represented by the 'muses.' It is worth noting that ingegno and arte are joined in four later passages in the poem,,. As for the raw content, that he has through his own experience he requires no external aid for it. Thus he is asking for God's help in shaping the vision and that of the 'muses' in making it rhyme, deploy compelling tropes, etc. In this formulation, here and in some of his later invocations Dante is asking for divine assistance in conceptualizing the matter of his poem so that it may resemble his Creator, its source, while also asking for the help of the 'muses' in finding the most appropriate expressive techniques for that conceptualization. alla sua scienza medesima"' ), that the 'lofty genius' is not Dante's, but God's, and that only these two elements are invoked, while 'mente' is merely put forward as having been effective in recording the facts of the journey (and is surely not 'invoked,' as the very language of the passage makes plain). The positions taken there have it that the 'muses' are the devices of poetic making that the individual poet may master (see DDP .Proemio: 'Dante probably believed that the Muses, even to the ancients, were only a figure of speech, a metaphor for poetic inspiration or art so in V.N.XXV.9 he says that Horace, calling upon the Muse, "parla. Why does Dante invoke the Muses in a Christian work? What does alto ingegno (lofty genius) refer to? Is the invocation of two powers ('Muses' and 'lofty genius') or of three (the mente, or 'memory,' of verse 8)? For a discussion of these points see Holl.1990.2, pp. The passage including the poem's first invocation is challenging and has caused serious interpretive difficulty. The Princeton Dante Project (2.0) - Commentary Inf II 7-9
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