this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
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Odyssey roughly translates to "The story of Odysseus", so yes, the name existed before Homer's story. The semantic connection of odyssey and a long, dangerous and arduous journey came way after that.
You could say it was an odyssey for odyssey to get that meaning
Odyssey no longer feels like a word. Damn you, semantic saturation!
Wow, I really hate to be this pedantic, but it's semantic satiation. I only remember because I had a similar experience thinking it was "saturation" because it just makes more sense, but apparently we're wrong.
No need to apologise, this is the kind of thing I hate getting wrong. Satiation. Satiation.
Hopefully it will stick in the future.
So it's more like "This is Bob and his autoBobography"
Does that mean a story about Homer would be a Homey?
The Odyssey was called Odysseia. The suffix -eia is an abstract noun suffix, so it's sort of like a titular case for the name. Following the same logic, it would be Homereia and thus Homerey.
but before the book no one was named Odysseus ever
The Odyssey was part of the Epic Cycle, so Homer likely inherited the figure of Odysseus from those stories. Whether he made up the name or the name Odysseus was already established, we simply do not know. Much has been lost to time, sadly.
Wether or not Homer's writings are part of the Epic Cycle is very much a matter of... strong opinions of historians. There's good reasons to include them (They're about the same thing) and not to (Written later, and not lost, like all the other ones, so it makes the discussions annoying). We only know about most of the epic cycle because people wrote about the poems and made summaries and cliffnotes.
Many people don't realize the original Cliff was a hunter-gather circa 9342 BCE who began taking notes on cave walls, then passed down this practice for millennia before it was adapted to parchment and ultimately became the notes we read today.