Recent movie interpretations have seen the central theme of Homer’s Odyssey as the conflict between the desire to return home, both physically and emotionally, and the lingering effects of war that impede it.
That’s not what the story is about, at least not fully.
The confusion starts with the translation of first line of the poem, which is an invocation to tell a story about a man, Odysseus, who is “complicated,” “a harried wanderer,” or “a man of twists and turns.”
Movies like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Uberto Pasolini’s The Return see trauma in this description of a conflicted hero, which makes the entire plot about a struggle to overcome it. The experiences of war, in particular, are what impede Odysseus from returning to his former life.
Only in Homer’s time, people who evidenced “twists and turns” weren’t suffering an affliction, they possessed a strength, and understanding it was a central tenet of coming to terms with the nature of existence.
It also doesn’t help that the original poem gives us no real description of Odysseus’s life before he left for Troy, so we have no proof that he changes.
Anyway, the ancient Greek concept of virtue was areté, which meant the best or complete matching of your potential to any circumstance in which you found yourself. This integration of self and scene led to eudaemonia, the highest good, or living well.
This meant, depending on the situation, that lying, cheating, and even killing could be legitimate qualities of living a good life, and Odysseus evidences all of them, from stuffing soldiers intent on merciless killing inside a horse statue intended as an offering to the gods, to taunting a cyclops after poking out its eye.
He has no problem with his soldiers raping and pillaging their way across various islands. After they’re all killed, Odysseus washes up on the shore of an island inhabited by a beautiful nymph Calypso, who falls in love with him. Unable to escape, he’s content to spend seven years sleeping with her. He later gets caught by Circe, another nymph, and spends a year sleeping with her, too.
Odysseus isn’t a victim, he’s a role model.
I don’t think Homer thought about “going home” in the same way as Nolan or Pasolini, either.
In the original poem and both movies, “home” for Odysseus is a palace in Ithaca where he rules with his wife Penelope and son Telemachus at his side. Getting back to it drives every plot twist.
But the poem’s Ancient Greek concept of nostos was a far more broad and nuanced reference to “a journey to the way things are supposed to be.” Home can be a physical place, but it embodies deeper meanings of purpose, order, and belonging.
This idea of home gets richer in contrast to Homer’s frequent use of the words lanthanō and lēthē to describe events wherein Odysseus and/or his men are offered the chance to forget not just where they’re going, but who they are.
That’s what makes the Lotus Eaters and their flowers of forgetfulness such a danger or, conversely, why his men are punished for forgetting prohibitions on killing the cattle at Helios’s island. What rallies his troops in the face of Scylla (six-headed monster) and Charybdis (a whirlpool) is a challenge: Remember who you are and what you’ve done!
When the Sirens sing their song, the threat isn’t a promise of sex but the lure of happy but meaningless oblivion.
Perhaps what’s most telling about the relationship between Odysseus’s virtue and longing for home is that the poem doesn’t end with a homecoming, unlike the movie versions.
After he and his son kill everyone and Athena stays their hands before they slaughter their families, too, our hero has a conjugal pause with his wife and then leaves again on another mission intended to placate Poseidon.
So, Odysseus never gets home, least not to the home of his imagination; not only does he leave again, but twenty years have passed. His son has grown to be a man and Odysseus has changed, too.
That’s why Homer’s Odyssey isn’t about a homecoming, it’s about a journey that never ends. It’s not about the wandering of one man…but of everyone.
We can’t blame meddling gods (or fate), which can seem to toy with us like we’re playing pieces in some inscrutable game. And we can’t blame misfortune or bad luck, which help make us who we are instead of detracting from us. Remember, Odysseus strives to hold onto his experiences, not forget them.
Blame the human condition.
The Odyssey and The Return are both really good movies, IMHO, and who knows what Homer or any of the nameless bards who contributed to the poem may have thought or intended. And leave it to the Greeks to tell us that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
But I liked the poem a lot more.