> surely one of the most pertinent moral positions of the Odyssey is the idea that justice will prevail: the good guy wins and gets the girl, the bad guys lose.
There's nothing good about Odysseus; he's a bad person and, IMHO, one of the most annoying, obnoxious personalities in literature. He leads his group around murdering and pillaging, not to mention using and manipulating - he's renowned for his lying and trickery. He gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego - at one point much of his fleet is sunk and men die because he pointlessly taunts enemies as they sail away. But if someone should act against him, he switches to victimhood and moral outrage - poor Odysseus! All his troubles and tribulations!
In the end he returns home alone, having gotten all his men killed, and encounters the 'suitors', who presume that with him missing for 20 years, likely he won't return. They are peaceably [EDIT: up to a point then that changed; see the reply below], though obnoxiously in some ways, competing to see who gets his throne and his wife's hand - leaving the choice to her [EDIT: though as the reply below states, she is being forced to marry one of them; she can't say no]. He slaughters them all, indiscriminately, for their presumption. The slave girls (did I mention that he takes and keeps slaves?) that are suspected (there is no trial or evidence or anything more than someone's accusation) of the grave crime of dalliances with the suitors, he unceremoniously has a rope wrapped around all their necks and hangs them together. Then he says, we need to replenish our stocks - depleted so unfairly by the mean suitors! - so we'll soon set out to raid and steal them.
Is this a good man? Did the good guy win? The Odyssey is a rich story of and study in personality and in human relations, and in politics; it's not at all about justice.
You left out that suitors are planning to kill Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus. That is not a minor detail. The suitors are described as abusive. Penelope does not want them there and Telemachus does not want them there. Both complain about suitors wasting house resources, killing animals, giving nothing useful in return and slowly bankrupting household. Pretty much any character complains about their behavior.
Penelope does not want any of them, she is however forced to choose. Telemachus ask them to leave the house openly, they refuse and treat him badly.
Penelope wants Odysseus come home soon and hopes for him coming home, because only him is assumed to be able to get suitors out of house. So much for Penelope freely choosing from them.
Odysseus is pirate and warlord through and poem is not hiding it. It is about warlord without glorifying the said warlord the way action movies tend to glorify similar characters.
> You left out that suitors are planning to kill Telemachus, son of Penelope and Odysseus. ... Penelope does not want any of them, she is however forced to choose.
Agreed, those are major omissions on my part (due to writing quickly and not thinking it through, sorry). However, they don't change my overall point. The worst person in the story is Odysseus (unless I'm overlooking some secondary character), who would have done the same and worse, and if there was any justice he would have been captured, tried, and imprisoned long ago - by the Trojans before the story began, in fact.
> Pretty much any character complains about their behavior.
That's not a reason to murder people. Also, the narrator is very sympathetic to Odysseus and makes his enemies unlikable, as narrators do. I take the narrator's depictions of them with a grain of salt.
Only suitors are so unlikeable. The other characters are either described by Odysseus himself or not nearly as much unlikeable. And also, narrator describe moments when one of suitors attempt to calm their behavior. I don't think narrator goes out of way as contemporary "narrators do". This is imo where Odysseus is different then action movies and adventure books, altrough people project that attitude on the poem.
The characters complains are concrete and provide multiple vitnesses to the abuse. The suitors are described to be abusive, threaten people living in house, mistreat them, kill animals and refuse to leave with open threat of violence if you try to make them leave.
The good innocent boys interpretation is not supported by the text, even if you mistrust the narrator. You can make that case about cyclop where Odysseus is intruder, but not about suitors.
I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I also think you need to pay closer attention to the text itself. You say that Odysseus "gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego", but the seventh line of the poem says that Odysseus' men perished because of "their own recklessness" (αὐτῶν ... σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν). Their own recklessness. Not Odysseus' ego.
"It's not at all about justice."
The poem is intensely interested in justice. The very first speech in the poem (1.32ff.) is all about justice, as is the second speech (1.45ff.). Characters in the poem, both gods and mortals, reflect on justice all the time. It may not be what you consider justice, but it's justice in the poem's own terms.
> I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I think you are mistaken to take this cliche and try to apply it to real people. I'm not really interested in your characterizations of me. Stick to the subject and leave other commenters out of it.
It's a mistake to take the narrator at face value. When Odysseus yells his real name to the Cyclops - without which Poseidon wouldn't have had a vendetta and kept them on that long journey - or when he taunts the giants who throw the boulders and kill his men and destroy his ships, it is his recklessness and not his men's that gets them killed. When he dallies in his flings with Circe and Calypso, while others wait and suffer, that's on his lust and ego. His men do some stupid things too, but it would not be hard to attribute that to his leadership - there are no bad followers, as they say ...
The narrator, either in earnest or maybe with some tongue in cheek, loves Odysseus no matter what he does. But if we are to read any story critically, we can't trust narrators any more than the characters they describe, something especially true in epics from the Odyssey to the Inferno to Moby Dick.
In the Odyssey people talk about the politics of power, how angering the gods gets bad results and so you'd better respect them; and they talk about fairness for themselves in the selfish way that everyone does - disregarding how they treat others. But those things aren't morality. The same things others are cursed for are what Odysseus is lionized for by the narrator and others. The only higher 'morality' is the politics on Olympus of Athena's and Poseidon's dispute over Odysseus' fate.
There is much discussion of the treatment of strangers and guests, one of those rules of the gods. However, I see it as more an issue of human relations - what do you do with strangers? whom do you trust? - there is no consistent enforcement by the gods or consequence when the rules are violated.
There's nothing good about Odysseus; he's a bad person and, IMHO, one of the most annoying, obnoxious personalities in literature. He leads his group around murdering and pillaging, not to mention using and manipulating - he's renowned for his lying and trickery. He gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego - at one point much of his fleet is sunk and men die because he pointlessly taunts enemies as they sail away. But if someone should act against him, he switches to victimhood and moral outrage - poor Odysseus! All his troubles and tribulations!
In the end he returns home alone, having gotten all his men killed, and encounters the 'suitors', who presume that with him missing for 20 years, likely he won't return. They are peaceably [EDIT: up to a point then that changed; see the reply below], though obnoxiously in some ways, competing to see who gets his throne and his wife's hand - leaving the choice to her [EDIT: though as the reply below states, she is being forced to marry one of them; she can't say no]. He slaughters them all, indiscriminately, for their presumption. The slave girls (did I mention that he takes and keeps slaves?) that are suspected (there is no trial or evidence or anything more than someone's accusation) of the grave crime of dalliances with the suitors, he unceremoniously has a rope wrapped around all their necks and hangs them together. Then he says, we need to replenish our stocks - depleted so unfairly by the mean suitors! - so we'll soon set out to raid and steal them.
Is this a good man? Did the good guy win? The Odyssey is a rich story of and study in personality and in human relations, and in politics; it's not at all about justice.