The Odyssey and the Nymphs

IradMalkin University of Tel Aviv

Nymphs in the Odyssey are particularly evocative of the experience of first encounters with new lands, lands which Odysseus usually approaches from sea, conforming to a Greek maritime perspective of hinterlands observed from a boat or the coast· In the Odyssey, such views are at first rather unfocused. Next the poet takes a closer look at the identity of the new land, asking not the name of the place, but the question « who lives here ? » It is only with the answer to that question that the concept of a « place, » such as « the land of the Lotus Eaters, » fully emerges. In this process of integration into a new land - but also in Odysseus's own re-integration into Ithaca - Nymphs seem to mediate between the traveler's debarkation and actual « arrival ».

It is the perspective of arrival and reaching a place that interests me here, both as an historian and a reader of the Odyssey. The Nymphs of the Odyssey may provide an authentic mental perspective for the way Greeks envisaged initial contacts with the « places » they arrived at, before such places acquired a territorial conceptualization, a name, or an ethnic definition. The examination may be worthwhile for religious, historical, and Homeric studies : for the history of Greek religion an important « mediating » aspect of Nymphs may be brought to the foreground ; in terms of Greek social and colonial history a mental, « proto-colonial » viewpoint and attitude may be revealed; finally, the Homeric exceptional number of Nymphs may appear meaningful in a new way.

My assumption is that the Odyssey's stories, poems, and even its entire text (depending on scholarly opinion about its consolidation and dissemination) were familiar in the early Archaic period (eighth and seventh centuries), when Greeks were sailing, trading and colonizing to an unprecedented degree. Fears and mental filters should be considered as

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