The Two Heros
The Two Heros and the World That Created Them
“The one who saw the abyss I will make the land know;/ of him who knew all, let me tell the whole story…” So begins Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving stories impressed upon the human consciousness.
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/ driven time and again off course, once he had plundered/ the hallowed heights of Troy.” So begins The Odyssey, a not quite as old story also engraved on the human consciousness.
I began my own journey in an attempt to find the common threads that bound ancient literature together and, ultimately, bound it to the literature of the modern human experience. I wanted to see what had changed, what was new, what was old, how to find the intrigue in stories that we’re dusting clean. But I ran into a problem. A few problems. Not much has changed; nothing is really old; the stories of yesterday are still just as, if not more, interesting as the stories we produce today and the most important aspect of a story’s relatability isn’t content but translator. For everything we’ve been through, the foundations of humanity have changed very little. Unless I wanted to write an essay that boiled down to a field guide of all the themes and emotions an author can put into words, a Library of Babel of human experience, then I was on a fairly fruitless endeavour. So, what to do?
I didn’t know. If it were up to me I’d probably be scratching through that Library of Babel of Human Experience by now with an absolute burnout driven mental breakdown only days away. Not a great plan. But luckily, I had guidance from the esteemed Professor Rockwell (who is, as of writing this, the sole reader of this essay and therefore this section will probably be nothing more than humour (2024 update: we got a new audience gang!)) who wisely suggested I narrow the scope of my study down from all of human existence to two people. Two lads. Two immortal literary paragons who have haunted our cultural halls since they first took breath.
Odysseus. Of Homer’s Odyssey.
Gilgamesh the King. Of, uh, Gilgamesh.
Even in these two novels almost the entirety of human experience can be found. Meaning I can draw comparisons between the two heroes and humanity all day and still come up with only a slightly abridged version of the Library of Babel of Human Emotion. That being said, I think there are three themes that carry the bulk of the narrative weight of each novel. Death and what comes after and what it was all for. Love and sexuality. Homecoming. Three universal human experiences carried on the shoulders of literary giants.
The history of the ancient Greeks and the ancient Sumerians are sister timelines as well. Both Greek and Sumerian history is muddled by myth and legend, with a lot of what we know coming not from historians contemporary to the time they write about, but from art, implication, historians who came after the time period, and archaeology (which is essentially a fancy word for garbage we dig up). We also adopt a considerable amount of our “western” cultural norms from both Greek and Sumerian historical heritage. As Paul Collins puts it in his book The Sumerians: Lost Civilization, “Like the Greeks … some of the region's peoples, such as the Assyrians and Babylonians, were never entirely lost, since echoes of them persisted in biblical and classical accounts, which were widely read and quoted in the west” (Collins 16). And as Pomeroy et al says in A Brief History of Ancient Greece, “In this form, Greek culture continued to flourish in … the civilizations of Byzantium and Islam, and, through them, the cultures of western and eastern Europe and the Americas” (Pomeroy et al 390). Greek and Sumerian culture running through the most vital blood vessels of nearly every culture on the planet in no small part because of the conquering nature of their civilizations. Alexander the Great ensured that the Hellenistic world spread far beyond the borders of Macedonia and the poleis of the Greek archipelago. While the cultural invasion of ancient Sumerian texts, art, and political practices spread with their eventual dispursal through the fertile crescent.
Trigger warning: Death
“No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!; By god, I’d rather slave one earth for another man–; some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive–; than rule down here over all the breathless dead.” (The Odyssey p265)
There is no glory in death. No celebration, no elation, no heartfelt reunion. There is naught but ruin and despair. Odysseus, upon meeting his friends and foes down in the halls of the dead, expects them to be resting in glory. Instead, he finds hollow souls wandering endlessly in a heavy mist, the only sign of their past life is a collective moan and the shrieks of grief ripped out of their throats. Death is, terrifyingly enough, not the end and regardless of the deeds done above the earth, there is nothing but pain in non-existence.
“If I must tell you the ways of the underworld that I’ve seen,/ sit down and weep.” (Gilgamesh p265)
Gilgamesh finds the afterlife to be much the same in his world, except he has to learn about this reality primarily through his recently entombed friend, Enkidu. Enkidu comes up from the underworld to bask in the presence of his friend one final time. Except there is nothing to bask in. Both men are in pain, one from loss and one from being the thing that was lost. Gilgamesh, king of all; Enkidu, mightiest of all; reduced to nothing more than two weeping shells unable to even comfort each other. There wasn’t glory to be found after all of their conquests. There wasn’t peace, there was nothing. Worse than nothing.
Both stories present a bleak depiction of death and both heroes are forced to confront not only their rapidly advancing future, but the reality of their friends’ fate. The most stunning difference, however, is in how each tale presents death. Odysseus comes face to face with a seemingly endless barrage of friends and foes both recently felled and long departed. Some, like his mother, come as a surprise to him. Yet, everyone knows him and everyone seeks even a glimpse of him. The effect is stunning, at least to me. It shows how precious life is; how the one thing people want after their heart stops beating is to just be able to breathe the air above ground once more, even if it is in slavery, as the legendary hero Achilles laments. The sorrow flows in endless rivers from the dead and nearly overwhelms the reader.
Gilgamesh is intimate. Deeply personal. There is no entourage of folks coming to greet Gilgamesh with warnings and dire news of the dead. It’s just Enkidu. Weeping, wishing he could hold his friend once again, his warning is less in his words and more in his being. A shade. Unable to interact with anything or anyone.
Humanity is obsessed with death and rightfully so. There are few things that every single organism to ever exist will universally share and death is chief among them. Modern philosophies strive to create a kind of comfort around death, reassure us that we will continue on in peace and happiness. That eternity won’t be so bad; our friends and family will be there and we shall want for nothing. These ancient authors thought differently though. Why would there be happiness in death? You are leaving behind all you know and those who remain are now without you. Why would death be comfortable? Few people in those days died in comfort and even fewer would view death as an agreeable fate to meet. Toil and hardship may be the ruling class above ground, but at least they could feel it. Even the mighty Heracles, who at least gets some kind of feast, ruminates on the horror of his fate down among the dead. Eternity is presented as a curse, not the blessing as many see it now.
Even with the similarities between death in each tale, I’m still struck by the differences. Odysseus brushes the encounter off and continues on his quest home, barely skipping a beat. The halls of the dead only appear again towards the end when the traitors’ souls are ushered there by Hermes. Odysseus (and everyone around him) considered himself as more than human, a sentiment that the narrative seems to support at every turn. Gilgamesh is taken by despair though. He falls to his knees with the shade of his friend and weeps. Gilgamesh is human. Suffers the consequences of his human fate; consequences he spent an entire novel trying to avoid. Gilgamesh is a king. THE king. Reduced to being human by Enkidu and the death all humans share. Assyrian religion didn’t hold humans in a place of honour, but told their origin story as being the result of gods not wanting to brew their own booze. Odysseus comes from a world where humanity is capable of divinity. Where our feeble flesh has the potential to harbour godly pride. Odysseus is a quarter of the king Gilgamesh and yet acts thrice the man.
This particular view on death, that it is all despair and loneliness and that glory was never worth it to begin with, might have some connection to the state of peace and warfare in the civilisation's past. Wiley Blackwell, in A History of the Ancient Near East, describes the ancient Sumerians as being in “a constant situation of rivalry” (Blackwell 151) with the political tides ebbing and flowing through various city-states. Nothing was permanent in the Sumerian world except for warfare and violent rivalry with neighbouring areas. Assyria’s fall came from their enemies rallying a grand conquering army to sack their majestic cities. (Blackwell 286).
This is all a very familiar song to the ancient Greeks. Sparta and Athens are typically remembered as the primary city states of the era, but the Greek world was full of power, small and large, all vying for influence in the Aegean Sea (Pomeroy et al 168). If it wasn’t the Peloponnesians against Persia, it was Athens conquering the Aegean, and if it not that, it was Sparta and Athens going for each other’s throats. Spartan culture is remembered as being brutal, viscous, and entirely warlike, but Athenian culture, while remembered for its democracy and art, was also steeped in warfare. Athenian naval dominance was daunting in comparison to the rest of the powers in the Aegean Sea.
Warfare was common in both cultures. Death, strife, and invasion were strangers to no one and the view of death as being miserable and glory as not being worth it is entirely understandable. Constant regional conflict is bound to make even the most steadfast of fortitude weary and encourage a philosophy of dreary existentialism and rampant escapism into a world where heroes regret their deeds and titles, just as good Achilles does in the underworld.
Trigger warning: Love
“So you’d love me in my turn and, as with them, wet my fate.” (The Odyssey p153)
“My body, that gave your heart joy to touch,/ vermin eat it up like old clothes./ My body, that gave your heart joy to touch,/ is filled with dirt.” (Gilgamesh p265)
Gilgamesh has an awkward, budding relationship with love. Tempted by a goddess to become her lover, yet refuses when he reflects on the fates of her previous lovers. Romantic love is frequently depicted in this way, brushed aside as a distraction from the ultimate quest of attaining immortality. But brotherly love - love shared with a comrade - that takes centre stage. Enkidu is the beating heart in Gilgamesh. His existence is what drives Gilgamesh into his quest for immortality, eventually leading him to beg, after failing to live forever, to see his friend again. Their love, while not necessarily outwardly romantic or sexual, can absolutely been interpreted that way. There is a sexual tension between the two friends; physical intimacy comes up frequently even after Enkidu has passed as references to his flesh bringing Gilgamesh joy ground the entire conversation around mortality. Gilgamesh unquestionably loves Enkidu with more passion than he could love anything. Enkidu shares that passion. Their loss of each other is completely heartbreaking. An appropriate place to end the story of the one who gazed into the abyss. The abyss of losing a loved one, trying to avoid that fate, yet knowing you’ll join them anyway. Not in happiness, as we think now, but in misery.
“Odysseus. There was a man, or was he all a dream?”(The Odyssey p400)
“unwilling lover alongside lover all too willing…/ But all his days he’d sit on rocks and beaches,/ wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish,/ gazing out over the barren sea through blinding tears…” (The Odyssey p157)
Odysseus has a much different relationship with relationships. Brotherly love is most definitely abound in the epic poem, but it doesn’t act as the grounding force binding the whole narrative and the characters together. It’s instead more of a background feature, with those who were loyal to Odysseus gaining the honour of not being slaughtered by his fury. Sexual love, however, is rampant throughout the story with Odysseus taking a considerable amount of lovers all while being a married man with a son. More importantly, a married man with a wife who remained faithful to him for the entirety of his time away, a trait she is celebrated for at every possible chance. Penelope is a tragic character, but she is not a weak one. Penelope evades her suitors with cunning wit and lethal intelligence, presenting herself as taken by despair, but her display with the axes and archery competition tell me she knew more than she was letting on upon Odysseus’ disguised return. She goes far for love and proves beyond any conceivable doubt that her dedication and loyalty to Odysseus triumphs over all else in her heart.
All the while Odysseus is out sleeping with a queen somewhere near Egypt, a sea nymph, Circe, and some other princess. That being said, it’s interesting to note that his heart is still, more or less, dedicated to his alleged beloved. His moping around in the Nymph’s realm proves as much, at least tangentially. Odysseus, while not a faithful partner, is still celebrated because his heart is in the right place. There’s an implied cultural critique going on here where the men are regarded as wholesome so long as they feel strongly about their beloved while women are celebrated so long as they stay true no matter what.
Love is inescapable. Biologically and emotionally. It’s one of those nifty elements of life where the absence of love is still some kind of expression of it. Like death, the differences between The Odyssey and Gilgamesh are mainly in focus. Love in Gilgamesh is intimate and personal: a clearly binding force that propels the characters along their fate and ends in a tragedy that we are forced to witness as though we were sat right there with Enkidu’s shade. The Odyssey is much grander. Sex flows in the water and love, while a major motivation for Penelope, is only a secondary motivation on Odysseus's mind. Both stories acknowledge that love is necessary; something everyone is searching for. That love between two humans can shift history even if it can’t shift fate.
Love in the ancient world takes a much different form than love does today. In ancient Greece, and especially Sparta, homosexuality and casual sexual relationships were common and even the backbone of educational systems in the area. Teacher/student sexual encounters were considered the primary avenue of sexual education and was encouraged as an important foundation to the educational process (Pomeroy et al 116). Yet there was still embarrassment about sex, “How much physical sexual activity was involved is unclear, because many Greek intellectuals who left written records of social customs tended to be embarrassed about sex and were eager to stress the cerebral element in same-sex romantic connections” (Pomery et al 116). There was still an acknowledgment of sex as being a bit taboo, but not to the extent that it is today. Love was a more generalised expression of physical attraction between same sex couples, in addition to being a major factor in intimate heterosexual couples’ love lives.
Sadly, we don’t have much in the way of surviving records on the love lives of ancient Sumerians. This is one of the departments where the severe lack of written cultural artefacts has dampened our knowledge. That being said, Collins does point to some findings that suggest a ritual, sacred marriage that would take the form of a celebration of love and fertility between the betrothed. These findings are also supported by the Greek historian Herodotus in his Histories (Collins 114-116). This suggests there did exist a formal system of love, or in the very least a celebration of reproducing partners.
Trigger warning: Homecoming
“not to disgrace your father’s line a moment./ In battle prowess we’ve excelled for ages/ all across the world.” ( The Odyssey p484)
“Inspect the base, view the brickwork./ Is not the very core made of oven-fired brick?/ Did not the seven sages lay down its foundation?’ (Gilgamesh p250)
Everyone has a home. Everyone is from somewhere. Everyone has a place where their heart belongs and, like love, the absence of said place says just as much, if not more, than the existence of that place. Many of us spend our lives seeking it. Some of us find it, some of us have to return to it. Both Odysseus and Gilgamesh knew where home was and eventually had to return. The entire plot of The Odyssey is for Odysseus to get home. He had to brave the wrath of gods and the dangers of the Aegean Sea all to return to a bed he could call his own. There is no more powerful force than home. Gilgamesh is a bit more subtle in his homecoming. He is not going home because he finds an inescapable need to return, but because he failed. He lost. There is nothing left for him out there, immortality is unattainable, Enkidu is dead, and the gods are worthless. Gilgamesh doesn’t return in glory, but in failure.
Each hero returns home with a different beat in their step, but both come to a rather comparable conclusion. Home is more than just a place, it’s also a legacy - something you can leave behind for others to leave, return to, dream about, and discover. Odysseus and his kin find great joy in this, of how their bloodline has built Ithaca, brought glory to their family, and how that can never be taken away! So long as Odysseus’ descendants live well. Gilgamesh sees his home in a similar manner. The stonework is solid, the foundations firm, the walls tall. Uruk is a mighty city and shall last until there are none to write history in the sands. Homecoming in both stories is about more than just a home, but is also about legacy. What we leave behind.
When death takes us and love is no longer burning bright, what kind of home have we built to be remembered by? That’s the ultimate binding theme between these two ancient narratives. The place where the shades of Gilgamesh the King and Odysseus the Cunning meet. Their legacies last well into their future and will last well into our futures. Not just the books themselves, but everything the books carry and stand for. They built homes that we now stand upon.
Given the fractured nature of the Greek and Sumerian cultures, home and belonging were exceptionally important concepts to the ancient peoples. Home wasn’t just a familial or childhood zone of comfort and nostalgia, but a community that kept people safe, fed, sheltered, and spiritually fulfilled. The ancient world was fraught with danger and there was no large support network protecting people from the elements and other people; all anyone had was their community. Cities were fortresses just as much as they were cultural and economic hubs.
The first cities can be attributed to the ancient Sumerians in the ancient near east. Their cities fundamentally changed the way humans lived and set the tempo for how humanity would exist for the rest of its run on Earth. Wealth distribution became more hierarchical, as families were no longer farmer and producing just to feed themselves and a small community, but could branch out into enterprise and financial escapades that might be recognisable to practices seen today (Blackwell 23-4). Cities also became hubs for professional craftsmen and tradesmen, dealing in specialised areas of production, diversifying the economy and the need for resources.
Greek cities developed in much the same way on the foundation that the Sumerians built. Athens especially was a prime example of the cultural resources cities provided citizens and history, as Athenian culture put great emphasis on the arts and artistic prowess, turning the city into a massive collection of cultural projects and historical monuments (Pomero et al 197). These cities, while serving as cultural and spiritual homes to the citizens, were vital to our understanding of the ancient world. Without these massive civilizational “homes” built by the ancient peoples, we wouldn’t have nearly as much of the physical evidence for their existence and culture, and I’d wager we wouldn’t have any of the gorgeous art that continues to inspire us and drive our own development to this day.
Works Cited
Gardner, John and Maier, John. Gilgamesh. First Vintage Books. 1984
Fagles, Robert. The Odyssey. 1996. London. Penguin Classics.
Blackwell, Wiley. A History of the Ancient Near East. West Sussex. Blackwell Publishing. 2016.
Collins, Paul. The Sumerians. London. Reakshon Books. 2021.
Pomeroy et al. A Brief History of Ancient Greece. United States of America: Oxford University Press, 2020.