Speaker 1:	Thank you, Jeremy, for such a nice introduction and to William and everyone who helped organize my trip here. I feel incredibly honored to be giving this lecture. I had the privilege to meet Martin [Oswald 00:00:23] just once at a conference on the origins or democracy, but I've certainly spent a lot of time with his, and continue to spend a lot of time with his work, so I'm really happy to be here.
	The talk that I'm gonna give today comes out of a chance conversation at a dinner following a panel that we organized on improvisation at the New House Center so this is my little plea tour and piece of encouragement to all of you, especially students, but faculty too, to go to a talk that you don't know anything about, to have a conversation with people who don't work in your own field, cause you never know what will happen.
	This was a panel, a series of events that we organized on improvisation and I was talking to a jazz musician and a philosopher about improvisation and so they turned to me and said, well, so what about improvisation and you know, in classical Greece, and without even thinking I said immediately of course, Odysseus. From that point on, this paper sort of wrote itself. 
	It's kind of a new project for me and I'd be grateful to you for your reactions and also for ideas about whether this is something that can to be, to go in other directions as well. 
	In Book 22 of The Odyssey, Phemius, the poet who's been entertaining the suitors in Ithaca during the Odysseus' absence, begs Odysseus not to kill him along with the others because he's a poet. This is the first item on the handout. 
	"I beg you Odysseus, respect me and have pity for me, for you will have trouble in the future if you slay a poet. I, who sing for both the gods and men. I am self taught, and the God has inspired me with all kinds of songs. I'm likely to sing for you as for a god, for these reasons, don't be eager to kill me." 
	Poets like Phemius, who operate within an oral tradition, must be familiar with a vast repertoire of songs and themes, often represented as here as divine inspiration. Yet, equally important is the oral poet's ability to improvise within that tradition, a skill the Phemius demonstrates on the spot by using, perhaps even inventing, an adjective, [inaudible 00:02:45], to represent his ability to improvise new songs similarly appropriate to new occasions. 
	By sparing his life, Odysseus recognizes and appreciates Phemius' improvisational skills as a poet, perhaps because he too has shown himself to excel as storyteller, knowing just how to frame each story for each audience. 
	When we first meet Odysseus, he's not singing songs, but is in fact involved in a different kind of improvisational activity. In Book Five, when Calypso brings him the news that he can leave her island, he must fashion for himself a sea going vessel to do so. Calypso gives him wood working tools and leaves him to the part of her island where tall trees grow, but then returns to her house leaving him to trim the timbers into planks to fit them together to form a raft. All of which he does knowledgeably and with the skill of a craftsman. 
	Calypso then returns with provisions for his trip, clothes, water, wine, a fair wind. In other words, she provides him with the tools and raw materials with which to build the raft, but he must fasten them into a vessel all on his own. The word here for raft is [sketiya 00:03:56], etymologically related to the adverb, [skadone 00:03:59], meaning something that is near or close at hand. The same root produces the compound, [autoskadionzo 00:04:06], meaning to improvise. One improvises from things close to hand and Odysseus improvises a raft out of what he's found on Calypso's island. 
	The two components, divine support and improvisation, that build Odysseus' raft, thus coincide with those complimentary aspects of oral poetic composition that Phimeus articulates in his speech of self-defense. With the support of the gods, he's taking what's at hand, and working it into something new. 
	Elsewhere I've argued that Odysseus' raft, the conditions of its making, function as a metaphor for the similarly improvisational style of his own role as a poet in the poem. Today, I want to extend that argument beyond the scope of oral poetics, to look at Odysseus not just as an improvisor of song, but also of himself. 
	Odysseus, after all, is the Greek hero most known for qualities that might well be called improvisational. Ingenuity, verbal dexterity, cleverness, and reading The Odyssey within the context of recent work in improvisatory studies will show that in addition to working his way out of tight spots, Odysseus invents and reinvents himself throughout the poem. 
	In representing Odysseus as an improvisor at both the poetic and the thematic level, The Odyssey thus articulates a notion of identity that's not essential, fixed, and unitary, but rather performed, inherently instable, and perpetually refashioned in response to whatever unexpected opportunities and obstacles that life provides. 
	Recent scholarship has shown that improvisation is not just the purview of the musician or the stand up comedian. George Lewis, jazz trombonist and musicologist brings both the practice and theory of improvisation together to show that the study of the social relations connected to the improvisational musical process leads to insights about the inventive potential of other forms of social intercourse as well. 
	For Lewis and his colleague and philosopher, Arnold Davidson, improvisation is not just a mode of performance, but also a way of life. They argue that improvisational music provides the ideal platform for experiencing the condition of improvisation, for investigating its effects on a much broader scale. 
	Before turning to the Odyssey, I want to spend a little more time exploring the potential of improvisation as a form of a ascesis or self enactment, in the ways that Lewis and Arnoldson suggest. 
	Working in the tradition of Erving Gothman, the sociologist who called our attention to the inherently theatrical nature of social life. The philosopher David Velleman looks to improvisational theater as a useful theater for thinking about rational agency. How we become who we are and how we interact with those around us. 
	Velleman argues that we gain understanding of ourselves through improvised encounters with others. These encounters then, what he calls getting along, not only help us make sense of the world, but are in fact constitutive of rational agency or the self. He uses the world of improvisational theater to make his point by comparing the way each of us constructs of sense of self with the way an actor works out how to play a given character on stage, by testing and trying out different roles and attitudes to see what works. 
	The process of self-enactment Velleman argues, entails a kind of practical reasoning that's inherently experimental, even to a certain extent, deceptive insofar as one must try on what one is not in order to see if it makes sense. He interprets interactions between people then as a series of improvisational collaborations, in which each person has access to a shared set of scenarios with which to try out, explore, and refine a sense of self. 
	The totality of this repertoire might called our way of life and Velleman argues that we are dependent upon socially developed practice to realize our rational selves rather than depending on individual autonomy to enable social practice. We play ourselves not artificially but authentically, not definitively but provisionally and repeatedly in a perpetual process of self-enactment by doing what makes sense for us to be who were really are at that moment, in those circumstances. 
	Let's turn now to Homer. Certainly while contemporary ideas about an interior sense of self are not really pertinent to the world or archaic Greece with its more socially constructed sense of identity. Velleman's reading of improvisation is the kind of experimental, practical reasoning in which deception and cunning play a productive role, is a fundamentally Greek notion. This is [etis 00:08:55], a quality of cunning and cleverness so particularly valuable to archaic and classical Greek culture. 
	Embodied in Greek mythology as the mother of Athena and most famously deployed by Polymetis Odysseus, the Greek notion of [metis 00:09:11] operates as [inaudible 00:09:12] have shown in a field of multiplicity, movement, and ambiguity. It's suppleness and elasticity enable it to thrive in circumstances where there are no ready made rules for success, no established methods, where each new trial demands new strategies and ploys. 
	These qualities are particularly valuable in the archaic period to a culture singularly engaged in the process of reinventing itself in a time of extensive cross cultural contact, movement, and innovation. In addition, Velleman's notion that the authentic self is determined by social context and practice rather than individual autonomous action is very much in tune with the way that scholars such as Greg [Noge 00:09:54] and Lisa [Maritzio 00:09:55] have argued that in the oral culture of archaic Greece, the authenticity of a text is conferred by it's audience in the moment of performance rather than absolutely linked to any one specific author. 
	The very qualities therefore that lie at the heart of a more contemporary investigation into improvisatory studies are already very much part of the Greek way of life and absolutely fundamental to the world of the Odyssey at all levels, poetic, thematic, and cultural. 
	My attempt today to approach Odysseus as an improvisor of the self is not intended to suggest an interior life of Odysseus as a real historical person, rather I propose that contemporary discussions of improvisation are a productive way of engaging the representation of Odysseus in the Odyssey on the thematic level. 
	First, let's start with Odysseus as a man of [metis 00:10:51]. A close reading of his encounter with Polyphemus in Book Nine will show Odysseus as work as a man of improvisation, one who continually refashions his identity in response to the circumstances at hand. In addition, the book explicitly links Odysseus' improvisatory skills with questions about identity, his in particular, and in the poem more generally. 
	At the end of Book Eight, after having treated Odysseus to some fine hospitality, the Phoenicians King Alcinous asks his guest who he is adding no one among men is entirely nameless. After giving his name as Odysseus, the son of Laertes and briefly recounting his experience with the Socinians and the Lotus Eaters, Odysseus launches into an extended account of his adventures with the cyclops Polyphemus. A story that introduces Odysseus with a different name, one that links his improvisatory skills with anonymity, the ability to be nobody. 
	First, let's take a closer look at Odysseus as improvisor. After landing nearby the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus announces that he'll leave most of his men behind and take just a few to go exploring so that, this is number two, he can find out about these people and learn who they are. The verb that Odysseus uses here and on nearly every other occasion on which he finds himself in a new and unfamiliar situation [Foreign Language 00:12:16], means to try, to make a test, to try one skill. It denotes the experimental, practical reasoning that in Velleman's terms is fundamental to productive improvisation. It combines the element of testing another with a process of trying something new oneself. 
	To return to Velleman's formulation, by testing the Cyclopes to learn who they are, Odysseus is also trying out possibilities for who he is as well. Odysseus and his men soon discover the cave of the cyclops on the island. They make themselves at home in the cave, build a fire, steal a little cheese, and wait for his return. Once Polyphemus does return, he addresses Odysseus and his men as if they were guests. 
	"Strangers, who are you? Where did you come from along these watery ways?" Odysseus' reply picks up on the reference to hospitality and improvises a story and identity for himself and his men as suppliants. He says they lost their way coming home from Troy. Instead of presenting himself and his men as the curious and greedy gift grubbing explorers that they are, Odysseus plays the role of suppliant, which is Polyphemus goes along should protect them from harm and produce the kind of hospitality that Odysseus enjoys from the Phoenicians. Polyphemus however rejects the suppliant scenario, he won't go along in Velleman's terms with Odysseus. Rather, he asks Odysseus where he left his ship and Odysseus recognizes the improvisatory nature of his question by attributing to Polyphemus a verb of experimental reasoning, [perodso 00:13:52] related to the one he used earlier of himself. This is number three. 
	"So he spoke, trying me out. But I knew too much and was not deceived but answered him in turn with crafty words." Odysseus replies falsely that their ships were destroyed, implying that he and his men are truly dependent on Polyphemus' suppliance. Polyphemus however, once again refuses to go along with this suppliant scenario, and instead of offering food and hospitality, he eats two of his men. 
	Again, Odysseus casts about for a way to outmaneuver the cyclops landing in the end upon the idea of improvising a weapon out of Polyphemus' extra large walking stick. Once Polyphemus returns from the field, he wants to know who his guest is. In response, Odysseus invents a new name for himself, number four. 
	"Then, you must give me a guest gift." I'm sorry. "Cyclops, you have asked me for my famous name and I'll tell you, then you must give me a guest gift as you have promised. No one is my name. My mother and father call me no one, as do all my others who are my companions." In response, Polyphemus tells Odysseus tells his gift will be to eat him last. But, Odysseus and his men as we know, blind the cyclops in his drunken stupor first. 
	The full significance of Odysseus' choice of names stems from the ensuing exchange between Polyphemus and his fellow Cyclopes who've come offering help. One that confuses the conditional form or Odysseus' fabricated name, [Metis 00:15:25], with his improvisatory skills, [Metis 00:15:28], this is number five.
	"Why Polyphemus, what do you want with all this outcry through the immortal night made us all so sleepless. Surely, no one of mortals against your will can be driving your sheep off, surely no one can be killing you by force or treachery." Polyphemus answers, identifying Odysseus by the name he knows. 
	"Good friends, no one is killing me by force or treachery." And they famously reply "If alone as you are, no one uses violence on you, why there's no avoiding the sickness sent by Zeus and you better pray to your father Lord Poseidon. Odysseus then chuckles to himself and so they spoke as they went away and the heart within me laughed over how my name and my perfect planning, my [matis 00:16:11] had fooled him."
	As others have already noted, the double word play that emerges here from the use of the conditional form of nobody, [matis 00:16:20] and the word [matis 00:16:22], designating the skills of improvisation, thus intersect with and complicate the original pun introduced by the indicative form of nobody, [utis 00:16:31] and the name nobody [utis 00:16:32] that Odysseus improvised for himself. This is the whole reason, more like the biggest reason to learn Greek, because you can't get this double pun if you're reading it in English. 
	Alright. What I want to call our attention to is that Odysseus emerges from his encounter with Polyphemus as a man of [matis 00:16:49] in two different ways. First, he presents himself as a consummate improviser. He is Odysseus, famous for his trickery, this is what he does, this is who he is. When confronted with an unfamiliar setting, he enacts scenes from a series of familiar scripts, for encounters with strangers and his actions offer a tour de force demonstration of the kind of practical reasoning that should Polyphemus have agreed to play along, would have resulted in a successful social encounter, as was the case with the Phoenicians.
	When Odysseus' initial strategies fail, he fashions an escape from the monstrous cyclops by improvising a weapon and a name for himself on the spot, both of which enable him to outwit the cyclops. In addition to giving him the tools to negotiate a successful interaction, more or less, a couple men more or less, with the cyclops, Odysseus improvisation helps construct his sense of self, his own identity in the poem. 
	The book concludes as it began with him stating his name, I am Odysseus, and the actions contained within these two nominative gestures construct his identity as a man of improvisational skill, or [matis 00:17:59]. And yet, just as the nobody pun works in its indicative and conditional registers differently, so the scene complicates Odysseus' identity as improviser by showing the reverse, namely that his improvisatory skills construct his identity as nobody, [matis 00:18:16]. 
	For the cyclops episode aligns Odysseus' identity as a man of improvisation with his ability, one that's not limited to the Book Nine trick, but in fact dominates the entire poem, his ability to be anonymous. 
	The cyclops episode in Book Nine links his trademark anonymity to his skills at improvisation within the framework of Odysseus' identity as Odysseus. The name pun articulates a relationship between a perpetual self enactment process of improvisation and the strategies for what might be called his negative capability. In order to be able to take on a new role at moment's notice, Odysseus must be able to and willing to set aside any fixed notion of his own identity and implications embodied in the [matis 00:19:03] [matis 00:19:03] wordplay are worked out thematically in the second half of the poem when Odysseus returns home to Ithaca as a real nobody, an unnamed beggar. His success in navigating a successful return is precisely linked to skill, his [matis 00:19:18], at being nobody, [matis 00:19:20]. 
	The action is the second half of the Odyssey, his successful defeat of the suitors and reunion with his wife Penelope, takes place with the help of Athena, further proof that we should read the encounters that structure Odysseus' return within an improvisatory framework. For as Athena says to Odysseus, this is number six. 
	"You and I both know sharp practice, since you are far the best of all mortal men for counsel and stories and I among all the divinities am famous for my [matis 00:19:52], my cleverness and sharpness." 
	United by their common association with [matis 00:19:57], Athena and Odysseus agree on a strategy to bring about Odysseus' successful return home that unfolds under the sign of [matis 00:20:05] in which his frequent changes and physical appearance, his so called lying tales, and his regular practice of testing or teasing can be productively rather than deceptively read. To use Velleman's terms, Odysseus, man of [matis 00:20:23], improvises himself authentically, not artificially, over the course of the final books of the poem. 
	As we'll see from closer readings of this encounters with Eumaeus, Telemachus, Penelope, and Laertes, Odysseus' improvisatory skills do not secure his safe return home as the same man to the same place he left 20 years earlier. They enable him to construct himself and his world in new ways. 
	When Odysseus arrives on the shores of Ithaca, the poet explains that he fails to recognize his homeland, both because he's been away for a long time and because Athena has transformed the Ithacan landscape to give it a different appearance. This is number seven. It's [Foreign Language 00:21:04]. 
	"Odysseus' subsequent exasperated set of questions about what kind of people live here, the same set of questions with which he began each of his adventures in an unfamiliar territory, clearly establishes Ithaca as yet another site in which he will need to muster his improvisatory skills." 
	At the end of Book 13, Athena reassures Odysseus that she will be by his side, [Foreign Language 00:22:00], always close at hand to help inspire his improvisatory actions, and they start with disguise. 
	Athena transforms Odysseus' own appearance into that of a dirty old beggar. This is number eight.
	"But come now, let me make you so that no mortal can recognize you, for I will whither the the handsome flesh that's on your flexible limbs and ruin the brown hair on your head and about you put such a cloud of cloth any man shall loath when he sees you wearing it. I'll dim those eyes that have been so handsome so that you will be unprepossessing to all the suitors and your wife and child, those whom you left behind in your palace."
	Athena explains that looking thus, Odysseus will be unrecognizable, as unfamiliar to his family, as the land of Ithaca was to him when he first arrived. With wrinkled skin, graying hair, and foul clothes, this Odysseus looks nothing like the strong warrior whom everyone in Ithaca bid farewell 20 years earlier, but perhaps exactly like what we would expect him to look after 20 years of hard travel and near death experience. Reading Athena's role in transforming Odysseus' physical appearance, here and throughout the second half of the poem, as a figure for imagining the real changes in physical appearance that time and travel inevitably entail, underscores the likelihood that Odysseus is in fact no longer the same man he was before he left. 
	Moreover, Odysseus must have changed in more substantive ways as well and the disguise that Athena, mistress of [matis 00:22:59] has created for Odysseus, represents the opportunity for Odysseus to improvise this identity beyond physical appearance as well, to learn how to take on this new role authentically. 
	Athena's role in creating disguises for Odysseus thus represents his skill at adopting new roles or characters, both as a way to negotiate encounters with those he meets at home, and in order to try on this new identity that emerges for and from those encounters. Odysseus' lack of fixed identity thus aligned with his propensity for improvisation. As he reveals in Book Nine, to be Odysseus is both to be an improvisor, and to be nobody. Odysseus has changed, just as did his native Ithaca in the time he was gone, and Athena's partnership here signals his departure on yet another improvisatory adventure of self discovery, this time at home. It allows him to try out what he has become, a well traveled old beggar, to learn who that is and how to integrate that evolving self into whatever home has become in his absence. 
	Appropriately, Odysseus goes first to Eumaeus' hut, to the home of the one man on Ithaca whose own personal experiences with travel and abrupt changes of fortune, most closely resemble those of the man Odysseus has become at this point in the poem. Eumaeus welcomes the stranger generously and then after feeding him and getting him settled, Eumaeus asks who he is. In reply, Odysseus tells the story of a wandering adventurer, trying it out, trying it on, for himself and for Eumaeus. 
	He begins by saying he's Cretan by both, the illegitimate son of a wealthy man, who was nevertheless treated well and given a good wife. He notes, he used to be good looking, but that time and hardship have changed him. He boasts he was a skilled warrior and that he preferred ships and war to life at home. He went to Troy with a Cretan contingent, fought there, safely returned home, after just a month however, wanderlust struck him again and he set out on an expedition to Egypt. He goes on to tell Eumaeus that he stayed among the Egyptians for seven years, before heading off to Phoenicia with a trader. A storm hits however, just as they're leaving Crete. He survives the storm and washes ashore in Thesprotia, where he's rescued by the king's son, given fresh clothes, and taken back to the palace. 
	Finally, he explains that although the Thesprotians agreed to transport him to [Dulykian 00:25:28] instead, they took his fine clothes, dressed him in rags, tied him up, and left him aboard shift, from which he escaped and swam ashore to Ithaca. 
	This all sounds familiar. Odysseus has fashioned for himself a story of himself that while not literally the same that he told the Phaeacians, it's not that far off either, just without witches and cannibals. His account of his Egyptian expedition for example, is told in a way that recalls the story Odysseus told in Book Nine about his encounter with the Ciconians. He says he stayed among the Egyptians for seven years, the same number of years Odysseus stayed with Calypso and the storm that hits him just as they're leaving Crete is described with much the same language that Odysseus used to describe the tempest that struck him and his men after their experience with the cattle of the sun. 
	In other words, Odysseus here constructs his sense of self before Eumaeus through the recollection and reworking of previous stories. It's a story of travel and adventure, of war mongering and trading, a tail of rapid and repeated changes of status, he's improvised a post Iliadic identity for himself, drawing upon previous roles, but adapted to this context. 
	Yet, Eumaeus doesn't buy it. He complains that the stranger's story is out of order, a lie. Apparently, Odysseus has not yet succeeded in constructing an authentic identity, one that Eumaeus will go along with, not even for himself perhaps. So, he tries again. After dinner, Odysseus decides he'll tell another story. He wants to try out Eumaeus, both to get a cloak and I'll argue, to improvise a more successful, more authentic version of who he has become. 
	The second story is set in Troy. The disguised beggar recalls a time when he was on a campaign with Odysseus and Menelaus. Having forgotten to bring a warm cloak on a cold night, he complains to Odysseus that he's freezing, and Odysseus tricks an eager Thoas into running off into the night, leaving his cloak behind, which our speaker then puts on. 
	Now this story Eumaeus likes. He calls it a blameless fable and in return promises that when the real Odysseus returns, he'll make sure the stranger gets his cloak. Odysseus improvises to get a cloak from Eumaeus and I would submit, to make sense of his own identity. In fact, it's obsession with clothing, both within the narrative and as part of the negotiation with Eumaeus, underscores the extent to which light clothing, the stories themselves help make the man.
	Through his improvised encounter with Eumaeus, Odysseus is trying out a new identity for himself, one that is the verbal equivalent of the aged appearance and worn out rags that he now wears. It's stitched together from previous experiences and previous tales precisely to fit this new occasion. Taken together, the two stories that Odysseus tells Eumaeus enables him to reconcile his I
	Iliadic past on the battlefields of Troy, with his more recent experiences of travel adventure on the high seas. Both experiences combine to form the man he's become at that moment in the story. 
	Next, Odysseus encounters his son Telemachus and their reunion underscores yet new challenges to Odysseus' evolving sense of self. He finds his son now grown and needs to learn to inhabit the role of father really for the first time. After all, Odysseus left for Troy when Telemachus was just an infant and Telemachus has grown up with tales, surrogates, and memories of his father, rather than the real thing. In the opening scenes of the poem, Telemachus replies to [Mentis 00:29:06] observation that he looks just like his father with the plaintiff claim that my mother says so but "nobody really knows his father." 
	For him, the question is not whether Odysseus is his father, but who is this man they call my father. As we've seen from the simile that precedes their father son reunion in Book 16, Eumaeus the swine herd has served as a kind of substitute father in Odysseus' absence when Telemachus enters the swine herd's hut, Eumaeus greets him "as a father with a heart full of love welcomes his only and grown son." The simile appearing as it does just before the real father son reunion and with his real father standing nearby emphasizes the extent to which Odysseus will have to try out or improvise the role of father. 
	He's not been immediately recognized as such by his son. Instead, Telemachus addresses him as a stranger and learns from Eumaeus that he's a man from Crete, much traveled, down on his luck. The conversation that follows between Odysseus and Telemachus lays an important groundwork for the reunion to follow. Telemachus treats the old man with respect and recounts the difficulties in the palace. Odysseus shows sympathy to Telemachus plight and offers help. 
	Once Eumaeus goes off to tell Penelope of Telemachus' safe return, Odysseus, with the help of Athena, tries to inhabit the role of father. First, Athena gives him the appearance of a much younger man. This is number nine. 
	"She made the mantel on the tunic that covered his chest turn bright and clean. She increased his strength and stature. His dark color came back to him again, his jaws firmed, and the beard that grew about his chin turned black."
	His first attempt at playing the role of young, handsome father is not entirely successful and Telemachus fails to recognize him as such but assumes instead that he is a god. Odysseus has to explain as he bends down to kiss his son. This is number 10.
	"No, I'm not a god. Why liken me to the immortals? I am your father, for whose sake you are always grieving as you look for violence from others and endure hardships."
	Telemachus however, remains unconvinced, explaining that no mortal could have changed appearances so radically so quickly. In other words, this attempt at playing the role of father is not perfectly authentic, it's as if Odysseus has tried a fantasy of the kind of father he might have been to Telemachus had he been home the last 20 years, and it's not a perfect fit. Instead, Odysseus has to assert his status as father once again, explaining no other Odysseus is gonna show up. This is number 11.
	"Telemachus, it does not become you to wonder too much at your own father when he is here, nor doubt him. No other Odysseus than I will ever come back, but here I am. This is what you've got. I am here as you see me after hardships and much suffering. I've come in the 20th year back to my own country." 
	Here, Odysseus confronts the gap between whatever kind of father Telemachus had imagined, and the one he himself is trying to become. I am as you see me, he says, and then attempts to overcome Telemachus' hesitations about his physical appearance by quoting the opening lines of his own poem. 
	"After hardships and much suffering, I'm come in the 20th year back to my own country." While, he may not be what Telemachus expected him to look like, he is the man he's heard about.
	Being Telemachus' father's a new role for Odysseus and the hesitation with which he and Telemachus initially accept their respective identities as father and son, suggests that this is a work in progress, one each is trying out and improvising. 
	At the end of the book however, Athena returns Odysseus' physical appearance back to that of the old beggar, a sign that he and Telemachus can now work together to get along as father and son as they really are now, rather than as they have imagined themselves to be. 
	In addition to learning to inhabit the role of father to Telemachus, Odysseus must also reconfigure his role to son as well and for interest of time, I won't go through Book 24 here, but I'm happy to answer questions about that and maybe talk about that more tomorrow. I'll just say that taken together, the scenes with both Telemachus and Laertes reveal Odysseus engaged in the process of reinventing his own identity as both father and son through improvisatory encounters with family members who have themselves changed during his absence as much as he has himself. 
	The ultimate encounter, the one to which the whole poem has of course been heading, is Odysseus' reunion with his wife Penelope, who it turns out is pretty good at improvisation herself. In the years since Odysseus left, she has drawn upon her own creditious [matis 00:33:51] to adopt a range of roles or identities as part of a protracted strategy to negotiate a working relationship with the suitors in her husband's absence. Sometimes, the grieving widow, sometimes flirtatious, the devoted daughter in law, the protective mother. 
	As with Odysseus, elements of deception feature as necessary parts of her improvisatory arsenal. She is able "to say one thing but mean another." The best example of which is her weaving trick. 
	When they meet each other in Books 19 and 23, Odysseus and Penelope bring these skills to improvise new identities for themselves and for their marriage. When they first meet in Book 19, they start in familiar roles. Odysseus is the visiting traveler, Penelope is the woman at home waiting for her husband, and then they begin to improvise new identities from there. 
	Penelope, intent upon demonstrating her [matis 00:34:49] while her husband was away creates an image of herself as clever and faithful wife, with a story of her weaving trick, and Odysseus invokes his now familiar Cretan persona, a man of travel and adventure. As such, he tells Penelope that he met Odysseus in his travels and when Penelope presses him for details of this encounter with her husband, he accurately describes exactly what he was wearing when they last saw each other. The disguised Odysseus then tells Penelope that the real Odysseus will be home soon, but she denies it, observing that "there is no one here such as Odysseus was, if he ever existed." 
	Their conversation has thus shifted from the identity of the stranger to questions about when Odysseus will return and what he will be like if he does. In fact, Penelope's decision at the end of book nine to hold the contest of the bow, depends on a performative rather than essential notion of identity. She's begun to adapt the if and when Odysseus returns, he might look like the man who sits opposite her and she begins to ask herself whether he might be able to act like Odysseus, even if he doesn't look like him. 
	The actions of the following books, Odysseus' successful stringing of the bow, and subsequent slaughter of the suitors, securely establish the aged be dragged begglar as Odysseus in the eyes of nearly all, and yet Penelope still hesitates to welcome him back as her husband. Even though both Eurycleia and Telemachus assure her that Odysseus has indeed returned and killed the suitors, Penelope remains cautious about confirming his identity as her husband. She reassures her impatient son, saying, this is number 12. 
	"My child, the spirit that's in me is full of wonderment and I can't find anything to say to him, nor question him, nor look him straight in the face. But if he is truly Odysseus and he has come home, then we shall find other ways and better to recognize each other, for we have signs that we know of between the two of us only that are secret from others." 
	Odysseus agrees, asking Telemachus to leave them so Penelope can try him out [Foreign Language 00:36:51], attributing to his wife the same improvisatory skills that he has deployed so often and so well. He signals that he's willing to go along with her to improvise their relationship as husband and wife anew. Indeed, acknowledging that his dirty and ill clothed appearance is at odds with Penelope's memory of her husband, his first move is to change his physical appearance to adopt the proper demeanor of a husband. He goes to have a bath and once again with the help of Athena, takes on a new appearance, taller, more buff, nice head of curls, this is all in number 13.
	When he reappears, Penelope, like Telemachus in book 16, struggles to reconcile the tall, handsome, well dressed image of a husband that Odysseus has improvised with that of the older bedraggled beggar he had been earlier. She explains she doesn't mean to be hard hearted, but she's a little unsure. Now take a look at number 14.
	Lattimore translates these lines in such a way as to imply a gap between Penelope's memory of Odysseus and what he looks like now. Lattimore translates "I know very well what you looked like when you went in the ship with the sweeping oars from Ithaca." And yet others have translated the lines in such a way to suggest that Penelope is now confronted with the very same man he was 20 years ago. "I know very well that you looked just like this when you went in the ship with the sweeping oars" 
	Either way, the use of the second person here makes it clear that Penelope has no doubts that this is Odysseus. She doesn't say I know what he looked like. Instead, her words acknowledge a gap between Odysseus once, what he once was and what he has become. She struggles to reconcile her memory of the Odysseus who went to Troy, perhaps looking just like the man standing before her now, with the older, travel weary man who slaughtered the suitors. She needs a different kind of proof, something beyond physical appearance. She needs to try out this husband who has returned. 
	Penelope order Eurycleia to take the bed Odysseus built and move it outside the chambers so he can sleep there. His outraged response, the famous story of how he himself made their marriage bed, how he crafted it by hand from a living olive tree, rooting their marriage similarly in the Ithacan soil, thus fashions him equally securely as Penelope's husband and the two are finally reunited, not just as Odysseus and Penelope, but as husband and wife once more. 
	The story of the marriage bed's construction recalls the scene in book five, in which Odysseus similarly improvised a hand built raft, suggesting that here, the poem's end, the raft, once symbol of Odysseus' identity as a man of travel and adventure, has been refashioned and come to rest as their bed, the enduring figure for Odysseus' marriage to Penelope and his identity as her husband. 
	In much the same way, I would argue that the role that Odysseus initially inhabited when he met Penelope in book 19, that of the anonymous itinerant Cretan beggar, fond of travel and adventure has been reworked as that of Odysseus, Penelope's husband, maker of and partner in her marriage and Penelope's enthusiastic embrace and acceptance of Odysseus as her husband on these terms suggest that he has found a way to reconcile the two authentically. 
	As with this encounters with Eumaeus, Telemachus, and soon with Laertes, so too with Penelope then, Odysseus succeeds in reinventing himself through an extended series of conversations and encounters with each other as the people they have become. Indeed, the time and effort it take Odysseus to persuade Penelope of his identity as her husband is a sign of how much he has changed, how much they both have changed in the past 20 years that he's been at war and sea, facing unimaginable dangers, and she confronting equally threatening challenges at home. 
	Each, the poem suggests has had to become someone new and their renewed relationship as husband and wife had to be slowly and carefully reworked to accommodate the people they had become. 
	In conclusion, improvisation is thus as fundamental to the thematic of The Odyssey to the construction of Odysseus as its hero as it is to the oral poetics of the poem, or to the larger social world of which it is a part. Reading the character of Odysseus, his love of lies, tricks, and disguise, in this context rather than as departures from a stable true identity to which he ultimately returns, reveals the extent to which The Odyssey as a poem, focuses on the inherent instability of what it means to be Odysseus. It highlights the degree to which he's not the same hero that he was when he left, nor will he ever be. 20 years of battle, travel encounters with seductive women and cannibalistic monsters have changed him and Odysseus continually reinvents his identity with each new encounter both abroad and at home. His ability to do that so well is represented in the poem in terms of his [matis 00:41:54], both his improvisatory skill, and his willingness to be nobody. 
	Together, they create the imaginative space in which to continually recreate identity to enact and reenact the self to be able to imagine his own nonexistence so he can temporarily and repeatedly become another. Time and again characters in the second half of The Odyssey refer to the man that Odysseus used to be, as if all too aware of the instability, the constant renegotiation of identities that The Odyssey, by contrast to The Iliad, celebrates. 
	Achilles, after all as his mythic character is explored in that poem, is famous for his in transitions, his battle prowess, and warrior mentality are valuable precisely for their enduring and nonnegotiable qualities. Odysseus' mythic personalities on the other hand, is the most mobile, the most open to be told differently again and again, and while later authors may cast his improvisational and contingent qualities in a negative light, The Odyssey celebrates them. 
	As Athena's favorite and a master of [matis 00:43:00] in his own right, Odysseus brings the skills and qualities of improvisation to each and every new situation he faces and in so doing, he continually reinvents himself as he scrambles to pit his competence or skill against whatever comes his way.
	Thank you.