1. I'd like to thank Helen Morales and Sara Lindheim for organizing the conference from which this essay emerged. It has benefited a great deal from their comments as well as those of the other participants.

2. Text is Allen (1917). All translations are those of Lattimore (1967), with occasional modifications by the author.

3. Earlier scholarship has focused on the provisional nature of Odysseus' disguise, highlighting the ultimate movement over the course of the poem from lies to the truth, from disguise to recognition. Cf. Murnaghan (2011) who has identified a larger pattern of disguise and recognition in the poem; Russo (1974) reads the use of disguise as part of a larger dynamic between themes of appearance and reality; Pucci (1987) and Peradotto (1990) identify these lies and disguises as temporary departures from Odysseus' real identity or the truth.

4. In the essay that follows I am interested in exploring the ways that reading metis within an improvisatory framework will open up our appreciation of the character of Odysseus in the Odyssey. I do not mean to suggest that his mythic identity is entirely a product of improvisation, nor that he is the only character in the Homeric poems to engage in this practice. Instead, I will argue that the Odyssey is interested in highlighting this aspect of Odysseus' character and that in so doing, the poem raises interesting questions about identity—instead of asking whether it is the ‘real’ Odysseus who has returned, it asks whether he is the same person as he was when he left—all the while emphasizing the creative rather than restorative elements of his return home.

5. Lewis (2009) argues that the improvisational arts are fundamentally social and collaborative practices that engage performer and audience equally in real time; as a result, they emphasize the role of the audience and highlight the practice of listening as much as that of the creative performer. The face-to-face nature of improvised music or theater thus creates an embodied, collective, social experience that takes place when musicians, actors, etc. come together in a collective space to create something that engages and responds to a live audience. Lewis also emphasizes the transformative nature of improvisational music—the ways that improvisational musicians, actors, or comedians continually engage with and rework pre-existing cultural forms, themes and practices to make the old over into something else, something new.

6. Lewis and Davidson (2012). See also Schutz (1964); Ryle (1976); Foucault (1997); Hadot (1995); Peters (2009); Velleman (2009). See also Paxton (2001) on improvisation as a creative condition for dance.

7. Velleman's (2009) notion of improvisational self-enactment shares a great deal with Goffman's (1956) theory of the self as the product of performance rather than its cause. Many others have written more recently on the performative nature of identity; additional discussions that I have found helpful include Butler (1990) and Hall (1996).

8. Velleman (2009), 9-33. Just as the stage actor depends upon an audience to determine how authentically he is playing his character, so too does the rational agent have an audience—his audience is himself. In other words, the naturally inquisitive human being becomes an audience seeking to understand his own behavior. He acts himself into existence, and he does so through contact with other similarly self-enacting improvisers.

9. Velleman (2009), 83f.: ‘Often we don't know in advance whether we can authentically enact a way of life that differs in some respects from our own; we don't know in advance whether one change in our way of life would eventually oblige us to make others, or whether we would still find ourselves with a clearer, more coherent self-understanding once the ensuing cascade of changes came to rest. We don't know, that is, until we try.’

10. Velleman (2009), 59-87.

11. Velleman (2009), 79f.: ‘We are thus dependent on socially developed practices for the realization of our rational autonomy, at least when interacting with others’.

12. Cf. Detienne and Vernant (1978), 11: ‘In the first place, the intelligent ability referred to as metis comes into play on widely varying levels but in all of them the emphasis is always laid on practical effectiveness, on the pursuit of success in a particular sphere of activity; it may involve multiple skills useful in life, the mastery of the artisan in his craft, magic tricks, the use of philters and herbs, the cunning stratagems of war, frauds, deceits, resourcefulness of every kind.’

13. Velleman's argument is a philosophical one that links improvisation to rational agency, and I am not trying to make a comparable argument about rational actors in archaic Greece. Instead, I find Velleman's analysis of the creative, rather than deceptive, role of improvisation to be useful for understanding the concept of metis in archaic Greece, and I want to argue that it will be helpful in interpreting the character of Odysseus in the Odyssey.

14. Cf. Nagy (1990a and 1996a); Maurizio (1997).

15. Alcinous unwittingly previews the story that Odysseus will tell in which he claims, in fact, to be ‘no one’, and links his improvisatory skills precisely to that willingness to set aside his ego in favor of anonymity. In the spirit of reading this passage as an example of improvisational theater, we might even say that Alcinous has set the scene that Odysseus will take up in the books to follow.

16. Cf. Barber (1975) on the middle voice in Greek.

17. Other examples in the Odyssey of πειράομαι being used in the middle in this way can be found at 4.119, 417; 6.126; 8.23, 213; 13.336; 16.305; 19.215; 21.418; 23.181; 24.216. See also the cognate verb πειρητίζω which is also used to describe the process of ‘checking someone out’: 14.459; 15.304; 16.313. On two occasions these verbs are used to describe attempts at a physical activity that result in a kind of self-enactment. πειράομαι is used extensively in Book 8 as Odysseus and the Phaeacians try their skill in athletic games: 8.100, 120, 126, 145, 149, 184, 205, 377. Both verbs are used to represent action of testing out the bow: 21.113, 124, 135, 149, 410); See also Hom Hymn Hermes 41-61 where the account of Hermes' invention of the lyre is represented as an act of improvisation (ἐξ αὐτοσχεδίης), and uses these same verbs of testing (ἐπειρήτιζε, 53, and πειρώμενος, 55).

18. This passage echoes Alcinous' question to Odysseus at the end of Book 8. There Alcinous had asked him what his mother and father called him since ‘no one was nameless’; here Odysseus' trick enacts that very scenario—his name is no one.

19. Austin (1972); Bergren (1983); Peradotto (1990), 147-49; Cook (1999).

20. Odysseus' encounter with the Phaeacians in Book 8 can also be fruitfully read within this kind of improvisatory framework. The scene begins with Athena disguising Odysseus (8.18-22) so that he will look fearsome and excel in the athletic contests with which the Phaeacians will ‘check him out’ (8.23). Athletic contest becomes a venue for this process, and the scene employs the verb πειράομαι both to designate individual athletic attempts and the general context in which they ‘try each other out in competition’ (8.126). Note Odysseus' use of the verb ϰερτομέω (8.153), which, as we will see in our reading of Book 24, is a key part of these improvisatory encounters. Euryalus challenges the role that Odysseus has improvised for himself here, saying that he looks more like a trader than an athlete (8.158-64).

21. Cook (1999) notes the complexity of Odysseus' identity as part of a larger argument for an active/passive dichotomy that defines the Homeric hero. According to Cook, all Homeric heroes embody the capacity to both actively inflict pain and passively to endure it, and he argues that Odysseus succeeds by activating his active (βίη) and passive (μῆτις) identities in different measures as appropriate to a given situation. While I agree with Cook about the ways that Odysseus activates different aspects of his heroic identity as appropriate to a given situation, I want to argue that there is a much broader range of identities and roles that Odysseus adopts over the course of the poem and that metis describes that particular creative, improvisatory ability rather than identifying one kind of role within it.

22. Odysseus' name, by contrast to Achilles' prominent placement in the first line of the Iliad, is postponed until line 21 of the Odyssey; he appears in the opening of the poem anonymously as a ‘man of many ways’. Odysseus makes his way unrecognized through most of the second half of the poem. Peradotto (1990), 116f., discusses the poem's unwillingness to name its hero as part of a strategy of deferral. Drawing upon Barthes, he argues that the poem creates a figure before giving him a name. Later (154f.), he discusses Odysseus as narrative agent par excellence, capable of assuming any character or predicate. Murnaghan (2011), 2n.2, mentions Odysseus' love of disguise by contrast with Achilles' hostility toward duplicity.

23. Cook (1999), 155, links Odysseus' identity as trickster to his strategies of anonymity: ‘Once again, a pun not only marks Odysseus' false identity as the strategy of a trickster, of μῆτις, but the trickster himself as nonexistent, as μή τις.’ Cf. Greenblatt (1980), 235, where, in an essay on Othello and the improvisation of power, Greenblatt links Iago's improvisatory qualities to his ability to deny his sense of self (what he calls ‘self-cancellation’) in ways that are very similar to what is going on here in the Odyssey: ‘Confident in his shaping power, Iago has the role-player's ability to imagine his nonexistence so that he can exist for a moment in another and as another’.

24. Homer's Odysseus is a master improviser; he brings his prodigious metis to bear upon all the many obstacles he faces in his delayed return home from Troy, and in so doing not only succeeds in overcoming those challenges but also in creating himself anew. In this respect my argument is compatible with although not strictly identical to those of Pucci (1987) and Peradotto (1990). Their focus on the relationship of metis to the construction of Odysseus' identity in the poem is informed by post-structuralist theories and is thus primarily interested in the multivalent possibilities of language and narrative. My attention will be more at the thematic rather than linguistic level and will focus on ways that the Odyssey represents metis as indicative of the transformative and dynamic nature of improvisation as an inherently social mechanism of constructing identity.

25. Athena's prominent role in Book 13, which essentially functions as a second proem to the epic, sets the tone for reading the second half of the poem under the sign of metis. Cf. Pucci (1987), 100n.4. As he points out (100f.), the poem offers both reasons for Odysseus not recognizing Ithaca—he has been gone a long time and Athena has made it different.

26. In fact, as soon as Eumaeus meets Odysseus in Book 14, he immediately imagines similarities between his absent master's experiences and those of the ‘disguised beggar’ who has arrived at his hut: 14.40-44. Others note similarities between ‘disguised Odysseus' and ‘real Odysseus' as well: Eurykleia (19.379-81) and Penelope (19.357-60; cf. 17.563). Cf. Murnaghan (2011), 10: ‘Odysseus conceals himself from the suitors by a disguise that mimics what the normal effects of the past twenty years could be expected to be.’

27. Athena, of course, is the queen of disguise. As Odysseus says to her at 13.312f.: ‘It is hard, o goddess, for even a man of good understanding / to recognize you on meeting, for you take every shape upon you.’

28. Block (1985), 1, discusses Odysseus' use of disguise as a kind of analogy to his lying tales, emphasizing that in both cases, ‘deceit can reveal the truth and may be essential to it’.

29. Murnaghan (2011), 29: ‘Eumaeus has a history similar both to the history that goes with Odysseus' disguise and to Eurykleia's history’. On the episode with Eumaeus and Odysseus in Book 14 see Roisman (1990), 218-36; Reece (1993), 145-64.

30. Cf. de Jong (2001), 353f., who uses the term ‘allomorph’ to describe these variations of tales told by Odysseus elsewhere in the poem. At 596f. she collects all the recurrent elements of Odysseus' ‘lying tales’.

31. 9.39-66. In both cases he urges his companions to stay put, to exercise some restraint, but is unable to prevent them from giving way to marauding violence and greed. As a result, he loses many men in the battle that ensues.

32. He washes ashore at Thesprotia where he is rescued by the king's son, given fresh clothes, and taken back to the palace just as Odysseus was clothed and escorted back to the Phaeacian palace by the king's daughter. Finally, he swam ashore to Ithaca where he took refuge, as on the island of the Phaeacians, in a thicket. Cf. de Jong (2001), 594f., for a list of all the different elements in the storm scenes as they appear throughout the Odyssey.

33. de Jong's (2001), 353, narratological analysis of this speech characterizes it as ‘again a mixture of facts and fictional elements, the latter often allomorphs of his own adventures’. Rather than continue to characterize the stories that Odysseus tells in Ithaca as ‘false’ by comparison with those ‘true’ tales he told to the Phaeacians, as de Jong and other scholars (e.g. Haft [1984]; Emlyn-Jones [1986]) do, I prefer to characterize each tale he tells as a new, and equally legitimate, account. These tales allow Odysseus to draw upon past experiences to forge new roles and are, in this respect, a fundamental part of the improvisatory practice. Foucault (1997) is helpful here for thinking about the way that Odysseus ‘re-uses’ elements of previous tales. Foucault discusses the use of written records such as diaries and letters for the process of ‘training of the self by the self’ (235). He suggests that written documents can be used as memoranda, not in the sense of recreating a single and accurate memory of events in the past—‘they do not constitute a “narrative of the self”’ (237)—but rather ‘it's a matter of constituting oneself as the subject of rational action through the appropriation, unification, and subjectification of a fragmentary and carefully chosen already-said’ (247).

34. Od. 14.462-506. Cf. Block (1985); Newton (1998). Levaniouk (2011), 109-35, discusses the prominence of cloaks to all the encounters that structure Odysseus' return.

35. Here as elsewhere in the second half of the poem, Athena's role in representing Odysseus as improviser is marked by the use of σχεδόν (16.157), key component of the word for improvisation (αὐτοσχεδιάζω) or other phrases designating proximity; she comes from nearby to help Odysseus take on a new appearance; to help him improvise a new identity. Cf. 13.221; 16.157, 455; 17.360f.; 18.70, 146; 20.30.

36. Scholars have noted that in Book 16, Athena gives Odysseus a different appearance from the one he had in Book 13 before she turned him into a beggar—here his hair is darker. Cf. Stanford (1959); Heubeck et al. (1988-92) ad loc. and at 13.399. Rather than attribute this discrepancy to the oral tradition as these scholars do, I argue that these different physical transformations or disguises underscore Odysseus' lack of fixed stable identity, even at the physical level.

37. As Telemachus says once he has accepted this stranger to be his father, ‘Oh father, I have always heard of your great fame, and how / you were a fighting man with your hands, and prudent in counsel’ (16.241f.).

38. The adjective translated here as ‘provocative’ (ϰερτομίοις) also appears to belong to the linguistic repertoire of improvisation. Recent scholarship has focused on the performative context in which the adjective appears—situations that involve a reorientation of relationship between speakers, a negotiation of status, attempts at influencing action indirectly. This fits well with our reading of this encounter within the semantic sphere of improvisation, as part of the process of role playing or testing out new ground. Cf. Clay (1999); Clarke (2001); Lloyd (2004); Gottesman (2008). Cf. Hom Hymn Hermes 56 as well as Odysseus' encounter with the Cyclops (9.474) for collocations of ϰερτόμιος with improvisation and the verb πειράομαι.

39. Murnaghan (2011), 18-23, notes the ways that the effects of Odysseus' absence create a kind of disguise for characters at home, as here with Laertes.

40. Henderson (1997), 89, notes the use of ἔμπεδος here (as in the Penelope scene) to refer to the groundedness of Odysseus' signs; they help root his identity into the Ithacan soil.

41. Both Athena and Odysseus recognize Penelope's improvisational abilities in terms of her skills at thinking things that differ from what she says: cf. 13.381; 16.409; 18.283. In addition, we might think of those moments in the poem where Penelope is characterized as looking alternately like Aphrodite or Artemis (e.g. 17.37; 19.54) as examples of her taking on the roles of married woman or marriageable young maiden.

42. The bibliography on this encounter in Book 19 is extensive: e.g., Harsh (1950); Amory (1963); Katz (1991); Winkler (1990); Doherty (1995); Felson (1994); Vlahos (2007). Most recently Levaniouk (2011) discusses the scene as a ‘performative agon’ and emphasizes the two-way communication that animates the scene rather than focusing entirely on Penelope's recognition.

43. Cf. also 325f. where Penelope explains that her motive for telling the weaving trick is to demonstrate that she excels all women in metis.

44. A key theme that appears from this initial improvisatory encounter is a mutual awareness of the changes that time can have on one's appearance and one's memory of another. Penelope insists she is no longer as beautiful as she was when Odysseus left (124-26); Odysseus observes that it's been twenty years since he saw Odysseus and he can only imagine what he looked like (222f.). The famous boar scar story, of course, interrupts the conversation between Odysseus and Penelope, and the interlude between Odysseus and Eurycleia emphasizes again the necessary changes that will have been wrought upon Odysseus' physical appearance. Upon seeing the old beggar, Eurycleia remarks that Odysseus must look just like this, underscoring the sense to which his ‘disguise’ as old beggar is really a representation of what Odysseus has come to look like after all this time.

45. Cf. Peradotto (1990), 155-60, on Penelope's protracted recognition of Odysseus: ‘What enables her to say, in spite of the changes wrought by twenty years’ time, that the person who calls himself Odysseus, before her now, is the person called Odysseus whom she knew when he sailed from Ithaca? And even if he is the “same” person, in what tropos has polytropos returned? As ptoliporthios ‘town-wrecker,’ fresh from the slaughter of the suitors, in the one guise, now so prominent, that she is least likely to have known before? No Penelope welcomes the same Odysseus twice.’

46. It is interesting to note that there is no change of appearance here with the slaughter of the suitors; Athena's help has to do with Odysseus' physical prowess not his appearance. To string the bow is to be Odysseus; failure to do so is to prove the opposite. At 21.93f. Antinous says the contest will be hard since there is ‘no one here such as Odysseus was’, and at 21.253-55, Eurymachus laments failing to string the bow and thus not being Odysseus. As noted above (n.17), the improvisatory verb πειράoμαι is used to describe the stringing of the bow, both for Telemachus (πειρησαίμην, 21.113) trying to be his father; and Odysseus himself at 21.394 (πειρώμενος).

47. He says to Telemachus: ‘Telemachus, leave your mother to examine me in the palace / as she will, and presently she will understand better; / but now that I am dirty and wear foul clothing upon me, / she dislikes me for that and says I am not her husband’ (23.113-16).

48. Russo (1992), 78: ‘Homer's characters often use the vocative of δαιμόνιος in a state of heightened emotion to address someone familiar who is behaving unexpectedly.’ In light of my argument for reading this scene as part of an improvised negotiation of new identities as husband and wife, I particularly like his suggested colloquial translation, ‘What's gotten into you?’. Like the adjective ϰερτομίος then, δαιμόνιος appears to function as part of an improvisatory socio-linguistic setting.

49. Cf. Athena's comments to Odysseus in Book 13.333-36: ‘Anyone else (ἄλλος ἀνὴρ) come home from wandering would have run happily / off to see his children and wife in his halls; but it is not / your pleasure to investigate and ask questions, not till / you have made trial (πειρήσεαι) of your wife’.

50. Lattimore (1967) translates them: ‘I know very well what you looked like / when you went in the ship with the sweeping oars from Ithaka’. Stanford (1959) suggests ‘a confused abridgement of something like this, εὖ οἶδ’ Ὀδuσσῆα ὡς τοῖος ἦεν ἐπὶ νηὸς ἰὼν οἷος νῦν ἐσσι σύ’. Most recently, Fagles (1995), 461, translates: ‘You look—how well I know—the way he looked, / setting sail from Ithaca years ago / aboard the long-oared ship’. See also Heubeck et al. (1988-92) ad loc.

51. Peradotto (1990), 156, argues that Fitzgerald's translation best captures the linguistic strain of the lines as they reflect Penelope's struggle to reconcile Odysseus' new physical appearance with the man she remembers: ‘I know so well how you—how he—appeared / boarding the ship for Troy’. In fact that gap had already begun to be closed at a key moment earlier in Book 19 when Penelope tells the disguised Odysseus that she has an old woman who can bathe his feet, for ‘Odysseus / must by this time have such hands and feet as you do, / for in misfortune mortal men grow old more suddenly’ (19.358-60).

52. Cf. Peradotto (1990), 156: ‘Philosophers cite two competing criteria for the reidentification of persons: the identity of the bodies that they have or the identity of their sets of memories. Whatever view one may espouse in this debate, it is interesting that Penelope applies both criteria.’

53. While the adjective kertomios is not used here, the provocative effect that Penelope achieves is much like that in the scene between Odysseus and Laertes in Book 24 in which Odysseus ‘tries out’ his father and provokes him to an outburst.

54. Cf. Dougherty (2001), 177-83.

55. Part of this new and complex identity also of course includes both his renewed vigor as warrior (evidenced by the slaughter of the suitors) and the successful father-son relationship that he has created with Telemachus.

56. We might think of the reverse-similes that Helene Foley (1984) discussed in the context of improvisation in these terms; a way to represent the strategies of re-invention as something else at which Odysseus excels.

57. In Book 17.537-40, for example, Penelope complains that there is no one to stop the suitors from eating her out of house and home ‘for there is no man here / such as Odysseus used to be, to keep the plague from his household’.

58. The qualities of instability and constant reinvention are positively valued in the Odyssey, at home in a poem that emerges from and participates actively in a culture that is, as Greenblatt (1980) noted about the Renaissance, inherently mobile and transformative. In late fifth century Athens, however, Odysseus' improvisatory qualities are much more negatively valued, in a culture that has become wary of the inherent instability of language as we can see from Odysseus' roles in Greek tragedy (e.g. Sophocles' Philoctetes or Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis). I am grateful to Helen Morales for calling my attention to ways that Odysseus has re-emerged as a positive model for improvisatory nimbleness in contemporary discussions of self-help: from Desersiwicz's (2014) discussion of the ‘mis-education of the American elite’ to Martha Beck's advice on ‘living to your potential’ in O magazine.