I. KELEUTHOS (SINGULAR)

It is illuminating to analyse the frequency with which the words keleuthos and hodos are used, particularly in respect to their grammatical roles and collocation with specific prepositions.

One of the most obvious differences is the frequency with which the two words are used in the plural: hodoi appears only once in the extant Homeric corpus (Il. 16.374). This points to other differences. The nearly one-to-one ratio of singular to plural uses of the word keleuthos is significant, particularly since, as we shall see, the word's domain of reference differs depending on whether we are dealing with a single keleuthos or many keleuthoi.Footnote ⁷ In the plural, the word keleuthos nearly always denotes some aspect of the physical, non-man-made world.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, these keleuthoi are rarely to be found on land, inhabiting instead the more fluid domains of sea and sky; this is clear from the repertoire of epithets appended to keleuthoi, which rarely appears unaccompanied by an adjective.Footnote ⁹ We find ὑγρὰ κέλευθα (‘watery’) used five times;Footnote ¹⁰ the winds have λαιψηρὰ κέλευθα (‘swift-rushing’, Il. 14.17 = Il. 15.620), the atmosphere ἠερόεντα κέλευθα (‘airy, hazy, murky’, Od. 20.64), the hinterlands between our world and the next εὐρώεντα κέλευθα (‘mouldering’, Od. 24.10). The winds are not the only heavenward entities to have keleuthoi—Night and Day also possess keleuthoi, as we discover in the portentous description of the land of the Laestrygonians.Footnote ¹¹

If keleuthoi generally appear to involve the natural world, anytime the word keleuthos relates strictly to the natural world, it is always and only plural; keleuthos in the singular seems to be the prerogative of sentient beings and movements they effect or control. Three categories of uses account for most occurrences of keleuthos in the singular in Homer. I shall explore each of these in turn.

The first involves a scene of travel—often by some vehicular means of transport—undertaken in a controlled, intentional manner (rather than, say, buffeted off course by a storm). Two very similar scenes from the opening books of the Iliad and the Odyssey exemplify this usage.Footnote ¹² The first (Il. 1.475–83) describes the return of the expedition sent to placate Chryses; having returned the aggrieved priest's daughter, the Achaean embassy sets sail for camp at dawn. The second (Od. 2.413–34) depicts the departure of Telemachus from Ithaca under the cover of darkness. In each case, considerable attention is paid to the anatomy of the boat, the fair wind sent by a superintending divinity (Il. 1.479 ≈ Od. 2.420), the way this wind fills the sail (Il. 1.481 ≈ Od. 2.427), and the ‘singing’ of the dark waves on the ship's keel (Il. 1.482 = Od. 2.428). At the conclusion of the set-piece (Il. 1.483 = Od. 2.429), we find it said of the ship:

The scene from the Iliad ends here. The journey to Pylos continues in the narrative frame, embellished by the securing of gear and libations to the gods before closing with this image of the ship (Od. 2.434):

Although I shall return to these passages later, a few points are worth observing now. First, the elaborate description slows down narrative time toward ‘scene time’.Footnote ¹⁴ This is especially true in Odyssey Book 2, where such details as the loading of the provisions onto the vessel, the casting off of the ship's cables and the positioning of the crew at the oars, the erecting and securing of the firwood mast in the mast-box are each accorded their share of narrative real estate (Od. 2.413–26). Meanwhile, the details of the sailing itself—the deep colour of the sea, the whistling of the wind and the ‘singing’ of the water on the ship's hull, the billowing of the sail—are narrated with a phenomenological emphasis, as if focalized through someone onboard, in language that appeals richly to the senses. Finally, the formulaic closing phrase (Il. 1.483 = Od. 2.429) is given in the imperfective (‘present’) participle rather than in the perfective (‘aorist’) participle. The scrupulously catalogued series of activities, vivid focalization, pace of narrative time, and careful use of verbal aspect all emphasize the experience of the process of journeying.

A second category of uses occurs during the Trojan attempts to break through the Achaean wall; of the word's seventeen appearances in the Iliad, twelve occur in Books 11–15 (and eleven in Books 12–15). The key clusters involve the breaching of the wall. In Book 12, Sarpedon leads an assault against the right flank of the Achaean wall; he manages to ‘seize the battlement with his stout hands and drag it down….’ (Il. 12.397–8); by doing so (Il. 12.399),

Exploiting this keleuthos proves more difficult, however. Ajax and Teucer plug the gap and beat back Sarpedon, who rallies his squadron by observing (Il. 12.410–12):

His men take up the challenge, but are met by the right flank of the Achaean front. The two sides fight to a dead halt; the Achaeans are unable to repulse the Lycian advance, while Sarpedon and his comrades (Il. 12.417–18)

Finally, Hector smashes the central gate at the end of Book 12, and a Trojan horde swarms the wall behind their talisman.

Three books later, Hector and the Trojans again find themselves on the wrong side of the Achaean fortifications.Footnote ¹⁵ This time Zeus sends Apollo to be his boots on the ground; the latter announces that he will serve as the Trojan vanguard himself (Il. 15.260–1):

He is as good as his word: less than a hundred lines later, the Achaean rearguard having been put to flight, Hector spurs his men on to the ships, while (Il. 15.355–8)

Over this ‘bridge’ the Trojan cavalry charge.

The third category occurs only in the Odyssey: the keleuthos that is blocked, hindered, checked, or restrained, a common phenomenon in a story dedicated to the travails of vexed nostoi. The word appears early in the poem; disguised as Mentor, Athena tells Telemachus that she came to see Odysseus (Od. 1.195):

she deduces, since he has not yet returned to Ithaca. Menelaus, marooned on Pharos, twice implores the house of Proteus (Od. 4.379–81 = 4.468–70):

About which immortal it is who does this to him, Odysseus has no doubt. Recounting his raft-voyage from Ogygia to Scheria, he names Poseidon as the culprit, the one (Od. 7.272)

Journeys narrated at length in the course of their transit; meditations on overcoming the obstacle of the wall en route to the ships; blocked passage in the course of a journey: what links these three categories?

We may begin by observing that the second and third categories form a complementary pair united around the theme of what we might call ‘blocked passage’. The examples in the third set thematize the appearance of an impediment to the course in question. Those of the second, meanwhile, occur at moments when the act of overcoming such an impediment is thematized; the instant passage is attained, the course that had been impeded appears as an entity in its own right. At the heart of both categories is the issue of passage: through a wall or an army of men, over a ditch, across the sea; passage blocked, passage checked, passage impeded, passage smoothed, passage won.

Incidentally, ‘passage’ does not here mean ‘mere’ passage, in the sense in which either a river, which otherwise blocks passage, can be crossed—this, in the Iliad, is the only apparent meaning of πόροςFootnote ¹⁷—or the breadth of the sea is ‘a virgin expanse, unmarked … a poros to be opened up’.Footnote ¹⁸ As the phrase repeated in Iliad Book 12 evinces, what is at stake in these episodes is passage with some manner of destination and purpose, for what Sarpedon ‘sets down’ is in each case παρὰ νηυσὶ κέλευθος: a keleuthos not merely to some place the other side of the Achaean wall but specifically alongside the ships (and this, too, with a goal: to burn them). This is equally clear in the ‘blocked’, ‘checked’, or ‘hindered’ keleuthoi of Odysseus and Menelaus. In Menelaus’ case, the appeal to discover the ‘fetterer’ of the keleuthos is framed by the request that Eidothea and Proteus ‘tell a nostos’; in Odysseus’ case, the keleuthos that comes into view is constituted by the gap between Odysseus’ present location and desired destination, the place where Athena herself stands. In each instance, the overall shape of the movement in question occurs relative to a clear destination.Footnote ¹⁹

We may further develop this claim, and conclude our analysis of keleuthos, by examining it alongside the first category of examples. Here again the contours of the journey undertaken are clear, the spatial goal well defined: from Chryses to the Achaean camp, from Ithaca to Pylos. As we saw, however, this is not what the passages spent their energy describing; rather, the emphasis was on the act of journeying, on the details that form the experience of being on the way. Instructive here is the persistent use of the imperfective rather than the perfective aspect with this use of keleuthos, and the frequent use of participles.Footnote ²⁰ As we saw, the passages in Iliad Book 1 and Odyssey Book 2 concluded with the line (Il. 1.483 = Od. 2.429):

The point is even clearer in the variant of this collocation used during the chariot race of Iliad Book 23. As the narrative cuts back to the breathless last sprint of Diomedes’ chariot team, a description rich in sensory detail again slows narrative time markedly. The final stage of the chariot race unfolds in literally granular units of action (Il. 23.499–506):

Finally, this collocation (and, with a slight variation, the whole of Il. 23.501) reappears when the Phaeacians’ fabulous ship speeds Odysseus back to Ithaca (Od. 13.81–5):

In each case, although (or rather, perhaps, because) these were defined, neither the specific route to be travelled nor the destination is of interest; the racetrack is simply the racetrack, the trip to Ithaca taken by a ship that steers itself. Rather, the poem shines its light on the nature of the passage, the journeying along these courses. In the first case: the sequence of action after breathless action, the marvelous thrill of the charioteer hurtling toward the finish line, kicking up dust, whipping his horses, hardly skimming the ground in his wondrous gold-and-tin chariot as he wings towards victory. In the second: amid the suspenseful anticipation of the final voyage, so long awaited, back to Ithaca, the preternatural frisson of riding on the majestic ships of the Phaeacians. Here, then, against the backdrop of a clearly prescribed journey, but one where the passage along the course—in its actualization or its inhibition, in its specific details and its sequence of events as a phenomenological experience—is in focus, we find the word keleuthos in the singular.

II. KELEUTHOS (PLURAL)

Keleuthos—but not keleuthoi. In emphasizing the action-oriented dimension of keleuthos in the singular, my claims are not at odds with Becker's discussion of the word keleuthos; beyond this, however, our analyses part ways more decisively. In differentiating between the meanings of the words keleuthos and hodos, Becker would distinguish what were ‘originally activity-concepts’ from what were ‘originally object-concepts’;Footnote ²² on his account, the word keleuthos belongs to the former category, hodos to the latter. While the dichotomy is illuminating, too many uses of the word keleuthos shade too far into the territory of the ‘object-concept’ (and likewise hodos and the ‘activity-concept’) to sustain the claim that this distinction constitutes the fault-line between the words keleuthos and hodos.

Or rather, too many uses of keleuthoi do. Consider, for example, the description of the land of the Laestrygonians (Od. 10.86):

Of the sea's ὑγρὰ κέλευθα, Becker claims programmatically that ‘the sea has such κέλευθα only when a ship sails on it. Without its journey, they would not be there.’Footnote ²³ The case of the keleuthoi of Night and Day, however, suggests that this understanding of keleuthoi is mistaken.

There are in fact problems at two levels, one lexical or referential, the other grammatical. First, the lexical level. The ‘journeys’ of Night and Day are arguably the regular repeated journeys par excellence;Footnote ²⁴ at a minimum, as long as day continues to follow night, and night day, the keleuthoi referred to in Odyssey Book 10 are simply ‘there’. Moreover, not only are ‘the journeys of night and day’ an archetype of regularly recurring phenomena, but, on an annual basis, the routes of the journeys themselves are as regular and immutable as the journeys themselves. Why should these keleuthoi be thought to exist only at the moment when the sun or the moon moves through a particular region in the sky? To the extent that the journeys of Night and Day are to be understood as part of the inner construction of the kosmos, the fixed course along which these journeys take place—that is, their keleuthoi—should be understood the same way.

Second, the grammatical level. Notably, the word keleuthoi (a) is the subject in this sentence (something we do not find with keleuthos in the singular) and, more importantly, (b) as the subject of this sentence, takes as a verb a form of einai (‘to be’). However contested the semantics of this verb may be, one point that has emerged clearly is that ‘a copula use of einai is implicitly existential’.Footnote ²⁵ We might, therefore, render Od. 10.86: ‘There exist the keleuthoi of Night and Day, and here they are near to each other.’

Perhaps these are exceptional keleuthoi; from a grammatical perspective this is true, as Table 1 suggests (for Il. 10.66, see Section III below). There are, however, other critical differences between the grammatical situations in which keleuthoi and keleuthos appear. On several occasions, we find the phrase κατ᾽ … κέλευθα as when, for example, Hermes leads the souls of the slain suitors to HadesFootnote ²⁶ or when Penelope wishes to be borne away by a gale along its ‘murky’ keleuthoi.Footnote ²⁷ This construction is never used with keleuthos in the singular, but appears regularly with hodos in its sense as the physical object.Footnote ²⁸

Table 1: Analysis of hodos and keleuthos in Homer (entries in bold emphasize notable features)

Nor is this the only instance where keleuthoi differs from keleuthos but resembles hodos. For one thing, keleuthoi never appears alongside διαπρήσσω, the verb most commonly associated with keleuthos where sea voyages are concerned; instead, keleuthoi is often the object of ἐπιπλέω (cf. Il. 1.312, Od. 4.842, 15.474). Notably, διαπρήσσω takes the words hodos and keleuthos (singular) as its patient in different ways; as we have seen, with keleuthos it governs the accusative, whereas with hodos it governs the genitive (Il. 24.264; Od. 3.475, 15.47, 15.219), just as it does for other words such as πεδίον (Il. 2.785, 23.364). Becker chalks this up to a distinction between the ‘subjective’ status of the internal object keleuthos and the ‘objective’ presence of, for example, the πεδίον, which is already ‘there’ regardless of the journey carried out across it.Footnote ²⁹ The phrase ὑγρὰ κέλευθα (Il. 1.312; Od. 4.842, 15.474), however, does not take a different case from the two other patients of ἐπιπλέω in Homer; all three patients appear in the accusative. Strikingly, the other two patients of ἐπιπλέω are πόντος (Il. 3.47, 6.291; Od. 3.15, 5.284) and ἁλμυρὸν ὕδωρ (Od. 9.227, 9.470), both of which plainly refer to objects that are ‘there’ independently of any kind of travel. Similarly, we find other linguistic patterns associated with keleuthoi that are also associated with hodos and with other words denoting clearly definable, independently existing physical objects. As we saw, Hermes ‘led’ (ἦρχε) the souls of the suitors along the dank keleuthoi (Od. 24.9) just as the Phaeacian herald ‘leads’ (ἄρχε) Demodocus down the same hodos (αὐτὴν ὁδόν) the Phaeacian nobles travelled (Od. 8.107). Perhaps most notably, in the three instances where the words hodos and keleuthos appear side by side, keleuthoi takes the same grammatical form as hodos, keleuthos in the singular a different one.Footnote ³⁰

Grammatically, then, keleuthoi is treated in a manner quite distinct from a single keleuthos, but shares several features more commonly associated with words such as hodos or atarp(it)os when these denote physical objects, items that are ‘part of the landscape’, as it were. What part of the landscape do keleuthoi form? We noted that ‘Night and Day’ have their keleuthoi, while the subjective genitive also appears in references to the ‘keleuthoi of the winds’ (ἀνέμων … κέλευθα, Il. 14.17, 15.620, Od. 10.20; and ἀνέμων … κελεύθους, Od. 5.383).Footnote ³¹ Striking in these passages is Aeolus’ favour to Odysseus in ‘check[ing] the keleuthoi of the winds’ by stuffing them into his vaunted sack—all but that of Zephyr, which he leaves to hasten the journey back to Ithaca (Od. 10.18–26). This is reminiscent of Athena's response to the storm Poseidon had stirred up in Odyssey Book 5; the goddess intervenes to check the keleuthoi of the winds themselves—all, that is, except for that of Boreas, which she leaves unblocked so that it can blow Odysseus to dry land. Boreas and Zephyr are winds whose courses are so fixed and steady that their names serve as cardinal points of direction; why should the keleuthoi along which these winds blow be less permanently established than the winds themselves?Footnote ³² At the least, these unchanging keleuthoi are used and reused with such frequency that they appear to garner a kind of object-residue. But why not go further and say that they appear to fall into the same category as the keleuthoi of Night and Day? If so, they too would form part of the underlying structure of the natural world, with all the permanence that would imply. Finally, similar in this respect are the εὐρώεντα κέλευθα along which Hermes leads the souls of the suitors; the landmarks described at Od. 24.11–13 suggest that this pathway, too, is a permanent feature of the world's architecture.Footnote ³³

In fact, the term ‘object-concept’—deemed inapplicable to the word keleuthos by Becker—seems to capture this phenomenon remarkably well. When describing the hodos that involves the action of travelling, Becker comments that such a hodos nevertheless retains the quality of an objective fact, a datum, a ‘given’, at least in certain respects.Footnote ³⁴ This description extends just as easily to the keleuthoi under discussion. To the extent that the patterns of Day and Night, the courses of the winds, and one's path to Hades after death might be understood as ‘givens’, as objective facts, so should the fixed, stable, repeatedly used keleuthoi associated with them be understood, too.

III. HODOS AS AN OBJECT

In fact, a first glance at the use of the word hodos in Homer suggests, rightly, that the same can also be said of its different senses: that, roughly speaking, the word's uses can be broken down into instances where hodos designates a concrete physical object, and instances where it should be understood to denote an activity.Footnote ³⁵

In contrast to keleuthoi, hodos in its sense as a physical object almost exclusively signifies a land route. One major difference between hodos in its sense as an object and keleuthoi becomes clear from the range of grammatical situations and cases in which the two words appear. The frequency with which hodos is modified by various spatial prepositions (especially those governing the genitive or dative case) relative to the word keleuthos is particularly telling (see Table 2).

Table 2: Spatial prepositions used with hodos and keleuthos/keleuthoi: frequency in Homer

Taken collectively, this array of spatial prepositions presents a portrait of the hodos as a concrete object with physical mass and spatial extension. While we may find the keleuthoi of Night and Day in a general proximity to each other in the land of the Laestrygonians (a fact whose salience lies not in the precision of the spatial relationship but in the extended daylight hours people in that clime enjoy), all manner of entities and creatures enter into more explicitly determined spatial relations with the hodos as an object. At any moment, we may find portentous herons hard alongside them (Il. 10.274), angry bees who live beside them (Il. 12.168, 16.261), clandestine night-warriors who leap off them (Il. 10.349), lions or stags who happen upon them (Il. 15.276; Od. 10.158), once-yoked horses that split to opposite sides of them (Il. 23.393), or, famously, chariots that cannot both pass (two abreast) atop them (Il. 23.419, 23.424, 23.435).

Similarly, several passages show that a hodos is an item in the universe of immediately visible objects. For example, we find at Il. 22.145–57 that a hodos takes its place alongside other such distinctive landmarks as lookout points, ‘windy’ fig trees, and two springs, one hot, one cold, where not so long ago the women of Troy kept their laundry clean.Footnote ³⁶ As an object, then, the hodos—unlike keleuthoi—is part of the visible landscape.

Moreover, if keleuthoi often appear to be part of the natural constitution of the world, the hodos as an object is almost invariably part of the built landscape; generally speaking, a hodos is constructed.Footnote ³⁷ When Nestor first proposes that the Greeks build the Achaean wall, he stresses the importance of building gates into it (Il. 7.340):

The line is repeated again when the Achaeans complete these gates (Il. 7.439). The product of deliberate fore-planning and laborious construction, this ἱππηλασίη ὁδός differs markedly from the functionally similar passage ‘bridged’ by Apollo in Iliad Book 15, which was also designed to take horse-drawn vehicles from one side of the Achaean fortifications to the other. The former is the product of planned organized construction, the latter an ad hoc creation produced in an instant; the first is a hodos, the second a keleuthos.Footnote ³⁹

Related to this constructedness is a sense of purposiveness: a hodos is constructed to serve a purpose, and one more enduring than the momentary demands of siege-logistics. The phrase ἱππηλασίη ὁδός indicates another point of comparison between keleuthoi and the hodos as an object. We saw that adjectives applied to keleuthos in the plural generally denoted the substance out of which they were made or the kind of domain traversed—humid, airy, murky, of the winds. In the case of the road as a physical object, however, adjectives or adjectival phrases are just as likely to refer to the kind of traffic they are intended to support.Footnote ⁴⁰ The association with wheeled traffic is particularly notable. Revealing here is the road Odysseus’ men take en route to the palace of the Laestrygonians (Od. 10.103–4):

Compare this with the keleuthos Apollo promises Hector he will ‘smooth’ (λεαίνω, Il. 15.261) before the Trojan advance. Where that keleuthos was provisional, the Laestrygonians’ ‘smooth road’ has been constructed for a specific purpose, apparently within a larger pattern of usage (note the imperfect καταγίνεον), one presumably tied to a regular need for timber.Footnote ⁴¹ Also related to the ἅμαξα is, of course, the ἁμαξιτός. While the precise role the ἁμαξιτός plays in the course of Hector's flight from Achilles in Iliad Book 22 is debated,Footnote ⁴² that the word itself, originally (and usually) an adjective modifying hodos, means ‘carriageable’, ‘able to be traversed by ἅμαξα’, is clear.Footnote ⁴³ The sophistication of the hodos as a ‘carriageway’ becomes obvious in the contrast between the Laestrygonian road and an image we find in a simile depicting Menelaus and Meriones as they labour to drag the body of Patroclus from the field (Il. 17.742–4):

Making do with a mere atarpos—a ‘beaten track’ of the rugged sort that Odysseus takes through the wooded country and steep terrain between the harbour and Eumaeus’ hut inland (τρηχεῖαν ἀταρπὸν | χῶρον ἀν᾽ ὑλήεντα δι᾽ ἄκριας, Od. 14.1–2)Footnote ⁴⁴—the mules toil laboriously to bring a single beam down from the mountain; on the smooth Laestrygonian road, one may bring it down by the wagon-load.

Similarly, we may contrast the level of construction and sophistication associated with both the Laestrygonian wagon-hodos and the ἱππηλασίη ὁδός through the Achaean wall's gates with that rarest of entities, overland keleuthoi. After the embassy to Achilles in Iliad Book 9 has proved fruitless, Agamemnon and Menelaus meet in the small hours and decide to summon the Greek chieftains to a midnight council. Having settled who will go to rouse whom, Menelaus asks whether he should return to Agamemnon or stay with Ajax and Idomeneus, whom he will visit; Agamemnon replies that the latter makes more sense, lest they miss each other in the course of their errands (Il. 10.66):

In contrast to the very limited number of specially constructed carriageable hodoi communicating the Greek camp to the Trojan plain or serving as a landmark in Iliad Book 22, these rare overland keleuthoi seem to be merely ways of getting through the camp between the tents and the ships, channels or ways of passage that take on a kind of object-residue by being used repeatedly and habitually.Footnote ⁴⁵

Though exceptional in being overland passages or channels, the keleuthoi through the Greek camp bring into sharper focus differences between keleuthoi and both hodoi-as-physical objects and the atarpoi discussed above. Like the ἁμαξιτός in the duel between Achilles and Hector, atarpoi, too, are marked as visible features of a landscape, as when Odysseus sees Ithaca for the first time but does not recognize its harbours and atarpoi.Footnote ⁴⁶ Equally, however, the keleuthoi are not in constant flux or radically unstable any more than the location of the tents and ships that together make up the camp is in flux or unstable; the keleuthoi through them may be invisible to the eye, but they are apparently as fixed and stable as the camp itself.

The contrast between the ‘many keleuthoi’ through the camp and the Laestrygonians’ single ‘smooth hodos’ or the Achaean camp's three ‘hodoi suitable-for-wheeled-traffic’ is neatly exemplified in the simile used to describe Ajax as he leaps from ship to ship to fend off the Trojan advance (Il. 15.679–84):Footnote ⁴⁷

The juxtaposition of the ‘many keleuthoi’ through the camp with the single laophoros hodos (‘highway’, ‘thoroughfare’, ‘main road’) is telling. In the first case, in the absence of the limitations imposed by constructing a sophisticated hodos, the number of keleuthoi available for use proliferate to such an extent that two individuals who are expressly seeking each other may nevertheless fail to encounter each other. By contrast, there being but a single route along which to transport one's team of horses (or Laestrygonian timber), the attention of the many men and women who live along the laophoros hodos is concentrated on the single location of the road.Footnote ⁴⁸

IV. HODOS AS AN ACTIVITY

While hodos frequently appears alongside spatial prepositions governing the genitive or dative when it signifies a physical object, when it signifies an ‘activity-concept’ it most commonly appears in the accusative.Footnote ⁴⁹ By shifting our focus from the hodos as a physical object to the hodos as an ‘activity-concept’, we are also shifting focus from the Iliad to the Odyssey.Footnote ⁵⁰ And in the Odyssey, no verb—and no cluster of words—is more closely associated with the word hodos than those of words derived from telos (‘end’). Notably, verbs derived from telos take hodos as a direct object three times and are used passively with hodos as the patient subject twice more.

Closely related to this is the fact that, unlike keleuthos, which often appears in the middle of an episode of travel, the word hodos (especially when paired with a verb derived from telos) often appears either before a journey has occurred or upon its completion. The first pairing between hodos and a verb derived from telos, during the debate in the Ithacan agora, provides an excellent example. Telemachus’ proposal to raise a news-gathering expedition is met with scorn by Leocritus, who suggests that Telemachus will never get around to leaving Ithaca and so ‘will never accomplish the hodos’ in question (Od. 2.256 τελέει δ᾽ ὁδὸν οὔ ποτε ταύτην). Later, after Telemachus has, in fact, embarked on this journey, Antinous will remark (Od. 4.663–4):

The completion of this voyage's return leg occasions a virtually identical outburst from Eurymachus twelve books later (Od. 16.146–7).

The same pattern of usage—namely, a verb derived from telos takes hodos as its patient at the precise moment the journey emerges as a totality, either just before it has begun or at its completion—also characterizes Odysseus’ journeys. When Odysseus appeals to Circe to launch him on his voyage home from Aeaea (Od. 10.483–4) with the words

she responds using the verb τελέω as a pivot (Od. 10.490):

Likewise, when Odysseus and his men are so close to completing their nostos that they descry Ithaca's hearth-fires, we find this pairing again. That their journey is essentially finished is precisely the concern, for what his crewmates lament is that, because the journey is effectively over, they will have no further opportunity to gain the spoils of war or collect gifts from abroad—as Aeolus’ bag of winds makes it seem Odysseus has (Od. 10.41–2):

We may observe two things. First, the hodos as an ‘activity-concept’ is something that one can ‘complete’, ‘accomplish’, or ‘fulfil’. Second, it is just at the moment when one views a journey as a single unified project to be undertaken (viewed prospectively) or already essentially completed (viewed retrospectively) that one discusses a hodos, and does so in terms expressed by verbs derived from telos.

The association between hodos and words derived from telos is not limited to the relationship between verb and patient. When Athena encourages Telemachus in the aftermath of the agora debate, she invokes Odysseus, saying (Od. 2.272–3):

Athena's assimilation of ‘accomplishing’ something—an ergon, an epos—to a hodos that is not ‘vain’ or ‘unfulfilled’ reveals another aspect of this meaning of hodos. The adjectives ἁλίη and ἀτέλεστος represent a key cluster of modifiers associated with the hodos as an ‘activity-concept’ in the Odyssey.Footnote ⁵¹ These feature most prominently in the discussions surrounding Telemachus’ journey. In a reprise of the debate in the agora, the suitors respond to Telemachus’ proposed hodos with the same contempt displayed by Leocritus; this time, Telemachus stands his ground, declaring (Od. 2.318):

Not long after he completes the first leg of this journey, another authority figure, this time Nestor, urges Telemachus onwards by invoking the spectre of a τηϋσίη ὁδός, a ‘fruitless hodos’, that must be avoided (Od. 3.316 = Od. 15.13; Athena delivers the second admonition). Closely related, then, to the notion of ‘accomplishing, completing, fulfilling’ a hodos is a concern with the hodos that is potentially ἀτέλεστος, ἁλίη, or τηϋσίη, ‘unfulfilled, fruitless’, ‘vain’, ‘useless’.

The sense mobilized here extends beyond a journey that is simply unfinished or incomplete—one that was somehow terminated before its scheduled point of conclusion—to suggest that a notion of purpose is inherent in the word these adjectives modify; an ‘unfulfilled’ hodos would not be one that is merely unfinished, but rather one that fails to fulfil or accomplish its purpose. The point can be expressed in two possible ways. The more modest claim is that just as ‘a stone can be sightless but not blind’ (for ‘to be blind requires that one be in the sight game’),Footnote ⁵² so in order for a hodos to be ἀτέλεστος, ἁλίη, τηϋσίη, ‘unaccomplished, fruitless’, ‘vain’, ‘useless’, it would have to be in the ‘accomplishment’, ‘fruitfulness’, or ‘usefulness’ game to begin with. A hodos, then, would be a notion with just such a nature that it is susceptible to predications involving the notion of purposiveness. Or, given the frequency with which the predications in question are made, we could make the stronger claim that not only is purposiveness an inherent aspect of the notion of the hodos as an ‘activity-concept’, it is one of the aspects of this notion emphasized most prominently in Homeric usage.

Moreover, specific purposes are frequently attributed to a given hodos. This is most commonly expressed via a verb of motion used in conjunction with a future participle, something we find in a number of the passages we have reviewed. Exemplary again is Circe's reply to Odysseus when the latter asks her to ‘fulfil her promise’ (Od. 10.490–3):

We shall see below how frequently the ‘verb of motion + future participle’ construction appears alongside the word hodos. While the nexus of adjectives identified above demonstrates the intrinsic relationship between the hodos as an ‘activity-concept’ and a sense of purposiveness more generally, this sense is often rendered explicit by the use of grammatical constructions that specify a particular purpose associated with a particular hodos.

Similarly, the word hodos is often accompanied by a pair of lexical items—the direction-indicating lexeme –δε and the preposition εἰς—that identify a clear spatial goal or destination. When Odysseus calls on Circe to ‘fulfil her promise to him’ (τέλεσόν μοι ὑπόσχεσιν ἥν περ ὑπέστης, Od. 10.483), this promise consists in ‘guiding (me) homewards’ (οἴκαδε πεμψέμεναι, Od. 10.484). Her response, we saw, redirects this hodos towards another destination (Od. 10.490–1):

ἀλλ᾽ ἄλλην χρὴ πρῶτον ὁδὸν τελέσαι καὶ ἱκέσθαι

εἰς Ἀίδαο δόμους καὶ ἐπαινῆς Περσεφονείης …

For his part, Odysseus underscores this sense of destination by echoing Circe's line-initial ‘to Hades’ (Od. 10.501–2):

This exchange mirrors the opening scene of the Telemachy proper. There, too, a female divinity proleptically narrates to another member of the House of Laertes a hodos the latter ought to accomplish; in that case, it is Athena-as-Mentor who sets the poem's plot in motion by addressing Telemachus as follows (Od. 1.280–90):

Just as Circe's hodos was to the house of Hades and dread Persephone in order to consult the spirit of Tiresias, so Athena spells out a clear itinerary: first to Pylos to talk to Nestor, then to Sparta to Menelaus, and finally back to Ithaca (and, again, in the service a clearly defined goal—gathering news about Odysseus—designated through the same purpose construction). Characteristic of the discourse of the hodos, then, is the appearance of place-names rendered as destinations with the direction-indicating lexemes –δε or εἰς. Whether one is completing a hodos, narrating a hodos, or guiding someone else's hodos, in the Odyssey the hodos in question is a hodos to somewhere.Footnote ⁵³

It may prove useful at this juncture to introduce a pair of distinctions from the linguistic analysis of verbal aspect and philosophical analysis of action: that between the perfective and the imperfective, and between events and processes, respectively.Footnote ⁵⁴ Introducing these terms is as an act of bricolage, not engineering; these dichotomies provide models from which we may simply draw inspiration, and are presented on a purely heuristic basis.

Verbal aspects are ‘different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The fundamental distinction in the domain of aspect is between the so-called perfective and imperfective.Footnote ⁵⁶ The perfective ‘presents the totality of the situation referred to’, which is to say that ‘the situation is presented as a single … whole’; that is, the perfective aspect depicts the situation ‘from the outside’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The imperfective ‘make[s] explicit reference to the internal temporal constituency of the situation’; it thus looks at the situation ‘from the inside’.Footnote ⁵⁸

That this description of the perfective can be applied to the relationship between the word hodos and verbs derived from telos is evident. In the situations discussed—Telemachus’ proposal in the agora; the suitors’ dismay at his journey to the mainland; the resentment of Odysseus’ crewmates as Ithaca hoves into view—there is no interest in the phenomenological experience or in individual actions that make up the hodos discussed; rather, the emphasis falls on the journey understood as a ‘single whole’ presented ‘in totality’ and viewed, whether after the fact or before it, ‘from the outside’. This contrasts starkly with the passages where keleuthos featured, particularly the microscopic precision with which the travel of the Achaean, Ithacan, and Phaeacian ships and Diomedes’ chariot were presented. Here the focus is emphatically on the ‘inside’ of the action, the attendant range of experiences, details and sensations that comprise the process of travelling a keleuthos.

Two further observations spring from this comparison. First, while keleuthos is often the object of verbs in the imperfect or present (that is, imperfective) form, in virtually all predications involving the hodos as an ‘activity-concept’, the aorist (that is, perfective) is used: Odysseus’ crewmates deploy the aorist participle to note their completion of the journey home (ὁδὸν ἐκτελέσαντες); Circe the aorist infinitive as she instructs Odysseus that he must take another journey (ἄλλην χρὴ πρῶτον ὁδὸν τελέσαι); Odysseus the aorist infinitive to command Eurylochus to lead him to Circe's palace (Od. 10.263 αὐτὴν ὁδὸν ἡγήσασθαι).Footnote ⁵⁹ There is thus a marked tendency for hodos and keleuthos to be the patient of verbs in the aorist (that is, perfective) and in the imperfect or present (that is, imperfective), respectively.Footnote ⁶⁰

Second, we observed that, where verbs derived from telos were involved, the hodos under discussion was yet to be embarked upon or had already been completed. This phenomenon holds across nearly all uses of the word hodos as an ‘activity-concept’; if aspect matters, so too does tense. Notably common is the link between the word hodos and the future tense. The exchange between Odysseus and Circe is again exemplary;Footnote ⁶¹ Odysseus responds to Circe's injunction to ‘accomplish another hodos’ by asking (Od. 10.503):

Another common pairing is hodos and a future form of εἰμί or its compounds.Footnote ⁶² Athena reassures Telemachus, fresh from the Ithacan agora, with the words (Od. 2.272)

before repeating this encouragement (Od. 2.285):

Laodamas, the Phaeacian nobleman who challenges Odysseus, repeats the claim verbatim (Od. 8.150); the future journey to be taken from Ithaca to the mainland, or from Scheria to Ithaca, lies ahead of each pair of interlocutors, both of whom view it ‘from the outside’, as a ‘totality’, a ‘single whole’.Footnote ⁶³ By contrast, as we saw, keleuthos appears when the activity of travelling is placed before our eyes as an act in progress.

It is not enough, however, to observe that a hodos presents a journey in its totality as a single whole as if ‘from the outside’. As the linkage with words derived from telos suggests, and the affiliation with the complex of adjectives discussed, the purpose construction, and the direction-indicating lexemes –δε and εἰς confirm, the single whole the hodos represents is teleological; that is to say, it is constituted in relation to an end, an end-as-destination and an end-as-purpose. As we have seen, a hodos is a hodos to somewhere in particular, a hodos one travels for a purpose.

One element of the ‘perfective’ can be examined further in relation to the ‘activity-concept’ sense of hodos—namely, that the perfective presents a situation as a single whole ‘without reference to its internal temporal constituency’. In fact, the hodos as an ‘activity-like concept’ is intimately concerned with the internal structure of the whole it presents; it is simply interested in this internal structure in a different way from the depiction of the ‘internal temporal constituency’ effected by keleuthos. The second distinction, between ‘events’ and ‘processes’, can help clarify this difference.

The distinction emerges at the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. At its modern base is the Kenny-Vendler classification of ‘situations’ (see Fig. 1 above).Footnote ⁶⁴

Figure 1: Modified Kenny-Vendler typology

Crucial here is the distinction between ‘processes’ and ‘events’ (and ultimately between ‘processes’ and ‘accomplishments’). Unlike processes, events are ‘telic’: they ‘have the fuller integration implied by the posit of reaching a goal or giving closure to a process’.Footnote ⁶⁵ By contrast, processes are ‘essentially atelic’;Footnote ⁶⁶ as a result, ‘the time stretch of [processes] is inherently indefinite, for they involve no culmination or anticipated result’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Accordingly, processes ‘can be protracted indefinitely or broken off at any point’ in a way that events cannot.Footnote ⁶⁸

‘Events’ can be further split into ‘accomplishments’ and ‘achievements’, distinguished by whether or not the action ‘is conceived of as lasting a certain period of time’.Footnote ⁶⁹ While achievements ‘capture either the inception or the climax of an act’ but ‘cannot in themselves occur over or throughout a temporal stretch’, accomplishments ‘have duration intrinsically’.Footnote ⁷⁰ This combination of the durative and the telic—the fusion of ‘a process leading up to the terminal point as well as the terminal point’—provides the essential qualities of the accomplishment.Footnote ⁷¹ It also gives us an important insight into the power and capaciousness of the hodos as an ‘activity-concept’ to encompass a wide range of phenomena and outcomes, experiences and upshots, processes and products within its basic conceptual framework. Little wonder that it should become such a ubiquitous presence in poetry, historiography and on the dramatic stage.

One final distinction between ‘processes’ and ‘accomplishments’ is relevant. Processes are ‘homogeneous’: ‘if “Jones is … running for half an hour”, then it must be true that “he is … running for every time stretch within that period”.’Footnote ⁷² By contrast, accomplishments are ‘heterogeneous: “in case I wrote a letter in an hour, I did not write it, say, in the first quarter of that hour”.’Footnote ⁷³ The homogeneity of processes is similar to that of ‘mass terms’ (as opposed to ‘count terms’); ‘bottle’ and ‘necklace’ can be identified as discrete countable items, whereas ‘wine’ and ‘gold’ are mass terms. Mass terms ‘generally do not have plural forms, or if they do there is a meaning shift: wines are types of wine’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Closely related to this is a difference in the nature of the internal constitution of what the term in question denotes: a bottle is not made up of other bottles, nor a necklace of necklaces, in the way that gold is made up of more gold, or wine of more wine.

We may take the second point first. Recalling that the hodos Athena described for Telemachus was defined by its destinations (Pylos, Sparta, back home) and the purpose for which it was undertaken, we may speak of the hodos as being concerned with the inner constitution of the journey understood as a whole, consisting of distinct heterogeneous items that together constitute the skeleton of the route. Likewise, Leocritus uses the word hodos when he casts doubt on Telemachus’ fundamental ability to undertake the journey (that is, as a whole) at all. At issue for Telemachus at this stage is not where he ought to go or mustering the will to do so, but rather marshalling the means to get from point A to point B (Od. 2.212–13):

As the indefinite ‘from here to there’ emphasizes, the specifics of the here and the there are irrelevant: the crux of keleuthos is the homogeneous process of travelling, the passage itself.Footnote ⁷⁵ Similarly, while the discussion concerning the itinerary and the journey-as-a-whole repeatedly features the word hodos (Od. 2.253, 2.256, 2.273, 2.285, 2.318, 2.404), and keleuthos is used just this once, during the actual sailing itself, we find keleuthos twice in quick succession (Od. 2.429, 2.434), while hodos is entirely absent. In short, when the structure of the route or the entirety of the journey is in question, hodos is used; when the process of ‘travelling’ is in question, we find keleuthos.

If the non-homogeneity of accomplishments points to the importance of the internal structure of a journey to a hodos, the homogeneity of processes can also help clarify an aspect of the distinction between keleuthos and keleuthoi observed above. Mass terms regularly have a different meaning when used in the singular as opposed to the plural. So far, I have been rendering keleuthos as ‘passage’, largely because its deverbative form helps capture the action of travelling. But it may also provide a felicitous parallel. In the singular, the word pinpoints just the sense of the keleuthos ‘from here to there’ that Telemachus pleads for: passage as an action, a movement from one place or point to another. ‘Passages’, by contrast, refer to places where such movement can be undertaken, where ‘passage can be effected’, viz. a passageway—just as we saw that the keleuthoi in the Greek camp were all the places, the passages or passageways, where passage through the objects that comprised the camp could be effected.Footnote ⁷⁶

TOWARDS A TELOS

In the preceding analysis I have attempted to turn the use of the distinction between an ‘object-concept’ and an ‘activity-concept’ on its axis. Rather than differentiating between the meanings of the words keleuthos and hodos, respectively, the notions of the ‘object-concept’ and the ‘activity-concept’ distinguish two different meanings of each word; we thus end up with a quadrant of sorts constituted by (a) ‘keleuthos-as-activity’ (keleuthos), (b) ‘keleuthos-as-object’ (keleuthoi), (c) ‘hodos-as-object’, (d) ‘hodos-as-activity’. Understood as an object (c), a hodos is a road, almost always built, that passes over land and often supports wheeled traffic (that is, a ‘rut-road’); this is in contrast to keleuthoi (b), which designate passages or channels, almost always in the natural world, that are regularly used but are rarely visible in their own right. The ‘action-level’ ([a] vs [d]) was clarified by parallels with discussions of verbal aspect and the Kenny-Vendler analysis of ‘situations’. As with the perfective, a hodos (often used with verbs with perfective aspect, viz. the aorist) signifies a journey viewed ‘from the outside’, that is, ‘as a single, unified whole’, while keleuthos (often used with the imperfective present and the imperfect) signifies the journeying, seen ‘from the inside’, either as a phenomenological experience or at the moment when blockage in the course of the journey becomes an issue. We find keleuthos used where the ‘process’-like durative element is emphasized (though still, unlike poros, always within a teleological framework), hodos where the emphasis is on the structural framework of the journey qua unified whole. Ultimately, the Homeric hodos-activity is an ‘accomplishment’—an activity with intrinsic duration but linked with a clear end, an end not only in time (in the sense of closure or finality) but also in space (in relation to a terminal destination) and in relation to a goal or purpose (in the sense of accomplishment or fulfilment). In Homer, the hodos as an activity is thus marked by a strong sense of teleology: a hodos is always a hodos to somewhere, undertaken for a purpose.