Two of my favourite all-time stories are Homer's Odyssey and Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and are both poems in fact. In this post I just want to investigate the similarities between them in terms of plot. I don't want to rip them apart or analyse the minds of the authors. I used to do that in English Literature classes and in my opinion it destroys the art. I wrote a degree-level paper on the symbolism of rape, marriage and motherhood in Coleridge's ballads (Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan and Christabel are the 3 most important ballads), and I felt like I'd dirtied the poetry by associating the portrayal of female characters with Coleridge's own perception of female figures in his own life as presented by Richard Holmes' biography of him. All I'm going to do is make a list of points that they compare on: it'll just be a case of comprehension. Furthermore I don't have a copy of the Odyssey on me right now so I'm relying on my memory of it.

First the obvious similarities.

The main plots both begin with a ship full of sailors on a long and arduous journey. Actually in the Odyssey the Ithican contingent sailed from Troy with a few ships (12?) but if I recall correctly all but one ship remained after they encountered the island of cannibals.

In each case all but one of the shipmates is killed, leaving the remaining shipmate to try and make it home on their own, and they both succeed in the end, but they are relatively helpless and alone in a mass of natural powers.

Other points (and there are a lot- I may edit this post with more as I think of them later)

It is stated in the Odyssey and implied in Ancient Mariner that the journey takes many years. The Ancient Mariner is old by the time he tells his story to the Wedding Guest, although we are never told how long he was alone for: presumably a long time given his mental state by the end.

In each story the sailors are punished by their own arrogance. The Ithicans had just successfully destroyed Troy and felt like they were all-powerful. They forgot that their success relied on the power of the gods and the forces of nature. The main Ithican contingent is killed after they raid an island for supplies.

Both stories have an event whereby an innocent animal is killed needlessly and those responsible are punished. In the Odyssey the shipmates kill and eat the cattle of Helios, the Sun-God, despite being ordered by Odysseus not to. In Ancient Mariner it is the mariner himself who shoots an albatross with his crossbow for no reason at all.

Both involve a transitional period between life and death. Odysseus descends into Hades to seek the advice of the prophet Tiresias, where he encounters his dead compatriots, Achilles, Ajax, Agamemmnon and Patroclus. The Ancient Mariner watches as the lifeless bodies of his dead shipmates come back to life and help sail the ship. He also sees a skeletal ship inhabited by Death and Life-in-Death, who play a game of dice to decide who gets the soul of the Mariner. He sees the souls of his shipmates (or does he see an angel for every corpse?)

The long journeys home are both punishments for immoral acts. The mariner, for killing the albatross, and Odysseus, for his part in the death of Achilles (and also possibly the death of Palamedes). Furthermore, Odysseus' penance didn't end when he reached home, for he had to carry an oar inland until he found somebody who didn't recognise it to be an oar. This second punishment is similar to the Ancient Mariner's second curse, which is to wander the land aimlessly telling people his story.

Both of their ships are finally sunk, and they are both independently saved from the ocean by benevolent agents, the Mariner by "the hermit good" and Odysseus by several people of differing magnitudes of godliness: Athena, Calypso and Nausicaa.

In both stories the benevolent agents are female and the malevolent agents are male. Odysseus is helped by Athena, Calypso, Nausicaa, and Circe, and his enemies are Poseidon, the Cyclops and Aeolus. (Also note the Sirens as "enemies" though.) Despite being one of the most dangerous heroes of the Greek age, Odysseus' powers are relativized by the powers of all those around him. he was known to be cunning, but his survival hinged on good luck and help from others during the Odyssey. In Ancient Mariner, the Sun is male and the Moon female, and he prefers the face of the Moon because it is cooler then. Life-in-Death is female and Death male, and she wins the game and he is allowed to live. The ship is also seen as female.

They both feature ignorant and worthless men who are only interested in material possessions. Odysseus encounters these people when he finally returns home. Hundreds of suitors have re-possessed his house and eat and drink his food. They are quickly and deservedly dispatched by the virtuous. I don't think Odysseus' shipmates are to be grouped with the suitors. While they may be ignorant and selfish, they have proved their worth by fighting in troy for ten years and being virtuous enough to fight in the first place. They aren't as virtuous as Odysseus but they carry more worth than the suitors, some of whom are to be detested for avoiding the call to arms in the first place and undermining the rule of Odysseus and his family. I think here we can mention the role of the Sirens. They appeal to all the weaknesses in human, particularly male, nature, and Odysseus is as susceptible to them as anybody else. The Ancient Mariner tells his tale to the Wedding-Guest who at first is self-important and not interested in the "grey beard loon", but by the end is left enlightened by the tale, or so we hope.

These must be the sorts of themes that I think make a good story. I don't want to accuse Coleridge of being a plagiarist because the most important part of Ancient Mariner for me is the poetry itself and not so much the story. In contrast I have only read translations of The Odyssey that render it more of a novel than a poem so I have no idea how it really is. The important themes common to both are clearly that no matter how powerful of a person we are, we have human weaknesses and are relatively very small in the world. Odysseus is particularly reminded of this as he encounters his friends in Hell, Achilles telling him something like, "I would rather to be the lowliest living peasant then the prince of all Hades." They both discover that we are all really just a drop in the ocean in the grand picture. The mariner himself discovers a love for all living beings, "both great and small". So they both conclude that life is important and other lives are to be respected. Possibly Odysseus learns this in a different paradigm of morality to what we are used to, nowadays denoted by the term, "Kantian ethics", and he sees no problems with killing the suitors. I think we can bring in a little Plato here, despite being considerably later than Homer. He said, famously, that "the unexamined life is not worth living". I think this is the sort of attitude Odysseus had in mind when he killed the suitors. Forgiveness was not a popular notion at the time. Odysseus was later killed when he went to defend Ithica from invaders, not realising that they were led by one of his sons by Calypso, who killed him.

The mariner on the other hand, practises the very Christian tradition of preaching. The fact that he is perceived by those around him as crazy demonstrates that he is a typical preacher and that the values he has learned are not widely shared by others. I think that Ancient Mariner has a more clear message than the Odyssey but that by this time in the evolution of the human race, that message is clouded in a sea of other messages such that few ever listen to the mariner's message. In the Odyssey the message is very simple. If anything Odysseus secretly knew right from wrong and he was only guilty of one sin, arrogance, and not many like the modern person is supposed to be. I think postmodernists would have something to say about our attitudes to truth and order in the modern era. In the Odyssey, Odysseus steps out of line and is put into line by the gods, who all report to Zeus inevitably. Colerdige however, portrays a metaphysical hierarchy whereby God and the Virgin Mary are appealed to as powerful deities, but they never appear in his poems. Instead we have roving deities like Death, Life-in-Death, and in "Christabel", Geraldine and "all those in the upper sky", who appear to report to nobody and do whatever they like. In the Odyssey we get the feeling that Odysseus' journey is pre-determined and controlled at every moment by Zeus. Yes, Poseidon tries to derail his attempts to get home, but we know that Zeus and Athena are secretly making sure that no harm will ever befall him. In Ancient Mariner however, nobody is looking over the mariner. He is left with the Sun and Moon which he gives personal identities to that ignore him, and his pleas to the Virgin Mother and his prayers to God, fall on deaf ears. He just appears to drift into the stories of others. The ship inhabited by Death and Life-in-Death seems to have no particular order or moral authority: they too are sea-faring opportunists who take advantage of whatever they happen upon. Coleridge is describing a world with more autonomy and chaos than Homer.

OK I'll leave it there before I drift off further into random expositions...