An Economic Approach to Homer's Odyssey: Part III

Published by Liberty Fund, by me, here is the third and final installment. Excerpt:

“Below is a brief and simplified catalog of the major polities described in The Odyssey:

• Pylos and Sparta: Visited by Telemachus, superficially seem normal but they seem sadder on reflection and Sparta relies on intoxication to support public order.
• Ogygia, or Calypso: An unbearable paradise, there is no utopia.
• Phaeacia: Relatively well-run, inward-looking, passive-aggressive, “control freak” syndrome.
• The Lotus Eaters: Another unbearable “utopia.”
• The Cyclopes: Anarchistic, brutish, and the community is ineffective and unable to defend itself.
• Aeolus: A closed society, based on incest, hostile to outsiders, a more extreme and dysfunctional version of Phaeacia.
• Laestrygonia: Giants, they throw boulders and murder, and in some ways resemble the Cyclopes. Tendencies toward anarchy are widespread, and not confined to the Cyclopes.
• Aeaea (Circe): There is the bed of tyrannical but beautiful Circe, or life as a well-fed pig. Again, utopias are impossible and immortality would bore us.
• Cimmeria: Dark, bleak, and unloved by God. Possibly the default setting.
• The Underworld: Everyone is sad (and dead), yet they talk like actual humans and also tell the truth. Lesson: the living cannot escape artifice and deception.
• Ithaca: Usually wrapped up in war and revenge-taking, chaotic and lacking in trust and lacking in clarity about sovereignty. This is another one of the default options.
• Syria: Initially prosperous but wrecked by the arrival of avaricious merchants. Unstable.
• Crete: A diverse society of perfect trust, within a narrative of Odysseus-in-disguise, but it has no chance of existing.”

My overall goal has been to pull out the implicit “public choice” strands in Homer’s Odyssey. It is very much a poem about politics, and the book is among other things a study in comparative politics.

Do read the whole essay, and here are parts one and two.