ABSTRACT
The chapter compares a passage from Od. 5 with a passage from Mbh. 3. Both epics narrate a journey undertaken by the central hero – respectively, Odysseus and Arjuna, whose comparability has been explored in Chapter 2. Odysseus is travelling to Scheria, Arjuna to heaven. In both cases, the journey starts and ends happily but includes an ordeal that is split into two halves. In the Greek, the ordeal is temporarily interrupted when the hero sights land, and his joy is described in a simile: it is compared to that of children who see their father recovering from a long illness. In the Sanskrit, the interruption consists of a brief episode involving the god Śiva and some seers; the seers are initially anxious about Arjuna’s ordeal but end up happy. It is argued that both journey stories derive from a single ‘proto-narrative’, and that in particular the Homeric simile derives from a main-story episode resembling that in the Sanskrit.
