The Odyssey

by Homer

Coming home means more than simply reaching a particular spatial or geographical location. The hero reaches his home country of Ithaca when the poem is almost exactly halfway through.

Each of these locations seems to offer a different version of home, and one can wonder when and where Odysseus feels most fully that he has arrived.

Thanks to the long process by which Odysseus gradually infiltrates his way into the community of Ithaca, he is able to assess who will help him, and whom he must destroy in order to reassert his own power over his home.

This is a text that allows us to explore our desire for power and for permanence, in the world of imagination, while also showing us the darker side of these deep human dreams, hopes, and fears.

The hymn was probably composed by a member of a family or professional organization who lived on Chios in the sixth century, calling themselves the Homeridae—the children of Homer.

The Odyssey was, along with The Iliad, the foundation of Greek and Roman elite education. Sections from the poems were also performed by rhapsodes to adults, for entertainment.

Plato’s character Socrates in the Republic famously insists that Homer, along with the Athenian tragedians, must be excluded from the ideal city, because his work provides a false image of reality, and stirs up emotions that are better repressed and controlled.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, Odysseus becomes “cruel Odysseus,” the unscrupulous destroyer of Troy, which was the home of the poem’s hero. But Aeneas himself becomes a new kind of Odysseus, in his search for a home that exists only in the future: the city of Rome itself.

Porphyry notes the fact that there is apparently no such cave on Ithaca, and that the details of the description are extremely implausible. The passage must therefore, he suggests, be read as an extended metaphor for the soul’s place inside the material, terrestrial world.

Dante had no access to the original Odyssey, though he knew the story of Odysseus. In his Inferno, he places Ulysses (the Romanized name for Odysseus) low down in Hell (the eighth circle out of nine, the circle of Fraud), because he leads his people by deceit into destruction. Dante’s silver-tongued, self-serving, and falsely inspiring Ulysses gives his men a rousing, deceitful speech urging them to continue their adventures for “virtue and knowledge”; he is urging them on, yet again, to shipwreck, on the Mountain of Purgatory. This rhetorically gifted version of Odysseus is not entirely alien to the character we meet in Homer.

The first complete Odyssey in English was that of George Chapman, in 1615. Chapman’s Odyssey, in rhyming pentameter couplets, presents the hero as a true soldier and gentleman, a proto-Christian and proto-Stoic whose greatest virtue is his ability to endure suffering and control his impulses.

In John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Odysseus’ clever, deceptively inspiring rhetoric and tendency to get lost on a long journey to a homeland from which he has been excluded by divine power are now the characteristics of Satan—the epic antihero who shows us what is wrong with classical notions of heroism from Milton’s perspective.

In Pope’s version, Odysseus is the ultimate hero of politeness and tact, the man who always has the appropriate response to every social challenge.

But The Odyssey could also be used as a way of thinking about what might be old and worn out in the Western cultural tradition. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” imagines the protagonist as a weary but compulsive imperial explorer, whose restless boredom makes it impossible for him ever to settle at home: he insists on pushing onward to the western stars, “made weak by time and fate, but strong in will / To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

New versions of Odysseus’ story were created in the literary world, perhaps most famously by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922), which uses the book structure of The Odyssey for a stylistically virtuosic narrative of one ordinary man’s day wandering around Dublin before returning to his wife.

Odysseus is a migrant, but he is also a political and military leader, a strategist, a poet, a loving husband and father, an adulterer, a homeless person, an athlete, a disabled cripple, a soldier with a traumatic past, a pirate, thief and liar, a fugitive, a colonial invader, a home owner, a sailor, a construction worker, a mass murderer, and a war hero.

Immersing ourselves in his story, and considering how these categories can exist in the same imaginative space, may help us reconsider both the origins of Western literature, and our infinitely complex contemporary world.

I went on to learn Latin and Greek, to read classics at Oxford, and to become a professional classicist. Over the decades since my eight-year-old performance, The Odyssey has always been with me.

The Odyssey relies on coordinated, not subordinated syntax (“and then this, and then this, and then this,” rather than “although this, because of that, when this, which was this, on account of that”).

“This is absurd, that mortals blame the gods! They say we cause their suffering, but they themselves increase it by folly.

Nothing can be more glorious for a man, in a whole lifetime, than what he achieves with hands and feet.

The gods do not bless everyone the same, with equal gifts of body, mind, or speech.

Wily Odysseus, the lord of lies,

But she never swayed my heart, since when a man is far from home, living abroad, there is no sweeter thing than his own native land and family.

The scouts encountered humans, Lotus-Eaters, who did not hurt them. They just shared with them their sweet delicious fruit. But as they ate it, they lost the will to come back and bring news to me. They wanted only to stay there, feeding on lotus with the Lotus-Eaters. They had forgotten home.

You had no shame at eating your own guests!

We reached Aeaea, home of the beautiful, dreadful goddess Circe, who speaks in human languages—the sister of Aeetes whose mind is set on ruin.

Inside the glade they found the house of Circe 210 built out of polished stones, on high foundations. Round it were mountain wolves and lions, which she tamed with drugs.

She added potent drugs to make them totally forget their home.

Your mind is not enchanted. You must be Odysseus,330 the man who can adapt to anything.

‘Laertes’ son, great King Odysseus, master of every challenge, you need not remain here in my house against your will. But first you must complete another journey.490 Go to the house of Hades and the dreadful Persephone, and ask the Theban prophet, the blind Tiresias, for his advice. Persephone has given him alone full understanding, even now in death. The other spirits flit around as shadows.’

Do not let them come near the blood, until you hear Tiresias.

At once he answered,440 ‘So you must never treat your wife too well. Do not let her know everything you know. Tell her some things, hide others.

I have a final piece of sound advice for you—take heed of it. When you arrive in your own land, do not anchor your ship in full view; move in secret. There is no trusting women any longer.

The goddess answered, ‘No, you fool! Your mind is still obsessed with deeds of war. But now you must surrender to the gods.

“Where am I now? 200 Are those who live here violent and cruel? Or are they kind to strangers, folks who fear the gods?

His mind was always full of clever schemes.

Be kind to guests while they are visiting, then help them on their way.

The worst thing humans suffer is homelessness; we must endure this life because of desperate hunger; we endure, as migrants with no home.

Athena noticed him leaving from the yard, and stood beside him as a woman, tall and skillful, and beautiful. Odysseus could see her, standing beside the entrance to the cottage. Telemachus could not; the gods are not160 equally visible to everyone.

And then Athena touched him, using a golden wand, and dressed him up in fine clean cloak and tunic, and she made him taller and younger-looking. He became tanned, and his cheeks filled out, and on his chin the beard grew dark.

Long-suffering Odysseus replied, “I am no god. Why would you think such things? I am your father, that same man you mourn. It is because of me these brutal men are hurting you so badly.”

For heavenly gods it is not difficult to make a mortal beautiful or ugly.”

I slept as their ship sped across the ocean; they set me down on Ithaca, still sleeping.230 They brought me marvelous gifts of gold and bronze and clothing, which are lying in a cave, since gods have willed it so.

There is no way to hide a hungry belly. It is insistent, and the curse of hunger is why we sail across relentless seas, and plunder other people.”

Zeus halves our value on the day that makes us slaves.”

shame is not a friend to those in need.”

When men are fighting for their own possessions,470 for cows or sheep, there is no shame in wounds.

Gods disguise themselves as foreigners and strangers to a town, to see who violates their holy laws, and who is good.”

Like a singer, blessed by gods with skill in storytelling—people520 watch him and hope that he will sing forever— so this man’s tale enchanted me.