The Odyssey

So, you ask me the name I am known by, Cyclops?...

Nobody—that’s my name.

Nobody—so my mother and father call me, all my friends.

Where one arms themselves for reading the Iliad, enduring its battles and grit, a different approach is needed for the Odyssey, Homers second masterpiece. It is better to say one launches upon the epic. We’ve left the beaches of Troy for the vast Mediterranean, with its diverse peoples and hostile monsters. The Trojan war is over—the Achaeans have won and return home. This second epic follows Odysseus journey back to Ithaca, which ends up taking an agonizing ten years. He is flown off course due to misfortune and the gods, and when he finally returns home he finds his estate ravaged by rude guests pining for his wife, Penelope. He murders them all and they live happy ever after.

While similar in language and mythology to the Iliad, the Odyssey is different enough to warrant a suspicion that Homer did not edit it. If he had, it must certainly have been in twilight years where the intensity of youth gave way to the nostalgia of old age. Regardless, the text acts as a marvelous twin to its predecessor: one celebrates courage in the face of death, the other intelligence in the face of life. One is local and magnified, the other is cosmopolitan and reductive. One restores hearth and family, the other destroys it. But the books also challenge each other somewhat, particularly in the Odyssey’s best chapter: Kingdom of the Dead. Here Odysseus chats with the shade of Achilles, who regrets his condition and wishes for life. Thus the deal fate gave to Achilles—fame or old age—is one Odysseus didn’t have to make. He got both. That scene put the entire epic in perspective for me, which I’ll expand on a bit.

The first half of the text is exquisite storytelling. We first follow Telemachus, Odysseus son, as he searches for his father, then we segue into Odysseus’s flashbacks as he recounts his epic travels to the Phaeacians, finally catching up to present tense once our hero gets back to Ithaca. These platforms frame the different episodes with appropriate lighting: Telemachus, both like his father and the readers, is lost and embarks on a quest to set things to right; Odysseus’ stories are set in a mythical fairyland past, hyperbole withstanding, which corresponds nicely with their content; and the reality dawns just in time for the present issue—Penelope’s plight—where the patriarch will assert himself and return order to the kingdom. This is an intricate and impressive narrative technique that lays the foundation for all future adventure/travel tales. Homer uses the text as the vehicle to explore the world, and though his geography is a bit off it’s still one of the most important perspectives of the “other” in early literature. Herodotus, for all his enchantment, has nothing on Homer.

Once we defeat the Cyclops and witches and sirens and monsters we finally encounter the most dangerous foe alive: wealthy bachelors. The second half of the epic follows Odysseus’ return to his country and estate—both in jeopardy and without a leader—and his method for setting things straight. He dons various disguises to test the faithfulness of his servants and survey the extent of the damage before deciding to act. The significance of the conceal-and-reveal tactic that repeats throughout the work escapes me. I guess one reason owes to Odysseus’ subtly in conjunction with his martial skill. I also see the value of viewing the common place under a foreign guise: fresh perspective is gained this way. But perhaps Homer is making a statement about perception. What we see is not necessarily what we get, and in this tale of discovering creatures both hostile and friendly we cannot base our judgments off of looks alone. Achilles may have hated one “who says one thing but hides another in his heart,” but that is reality’s norm. Odysseus understood this, and so adopted and excelled in this trait. Fighting isn’t the only answer, sometimes nuance is needed.

This is the big difference between Homer’s two works. The Iliad deals with destructive beauty, so grand and impressive it consumes itself in blazing glory. The Odyssey deals with quiet beauty: learning about others, seeing the world, constructing meaning from experience, the relationship between men and women (the Odyssey is in many ways a feminist work), restoring peace to your home, investing in family, and putting down the sword for a plowshare. Don’t get me wrong, Odysseus fights a lot in the text, but often it seems to make matters worse. Even in the spectacular climax where he murders Penelope’s suitors, their families come together to exact retribution on Odysseus. It takes a Deus ex Machina to finally restore peace and end the epic. I’m not sure what to make of this ending, and I daresay it undermines its own hero. But maybe that’s the goal. War must be curbed at some point so life can go on. We must protect what we love, but compromise and even ethical ambiguity are necessary to do so. The unrelenting pride that imbues these heroes must slack for civilization to progress. Thus future generations will lament for the end of the “heroic age,” even as they recognize their survival was contingent on its death.

But there’s a positive aspect of all this civil duplicity: the art of fiction. What I love about Odysseus is how he’s a story-teller. He constantly weaves narratives—both ‘true’ and ‘false’—to enchant and deceive his audience. Much like Prospero in the Tempest, Homer’s protagonist is almost conscious of his life’s apparatus. He knows he is in a story; both creating and disseminating it. His name, as with Achilles, is what needs to survive, no less than his country and family. It’s part of his legacy. It’s why I find the epic so inspiring: it depicts a man who navigates life’s difficulties with intelligence, meets challenges with bravery, and ultimately invests in civilization. Odysseus doesn’t let fate or the gods rule him; he pushes on, both with an eye on the past (root meaning of ‘nostalgia’ is ‘love of home’) and mind to the future. It’s because of him that we coin all great adventures odysseys.