Odysseus, Homer, and the Story That Shaped the Western Imagination

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

‘Tell me, Muse, of the man of many twists and turns…’ Few openings in literature are more famous—or revealing. The Greek is simpler still: andra, ‘the man’. Not the warrior, nor the king, nor the conqueror. Simply the man. It is an extraordinary way to begin. Homer could have sung of the Wooden Horse, the sack of Troy, or the countless heroes who fought and fell beneath its walls. His earlier epic, the Iliad, opens on overpowering passion: ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…’ One poem begins with wrath; the other with a person. One asks how a hero should fight and die; the other how a human being should live. Perhaps that is why, after nearly three thousand years, the Odyssey still feels so astonishingly alive.

Homer himself never seems to tire of Odysseus. He gives him more epithets than any other character: ‘the man of many sorrows’ (polypenthes), ‘the man of many devices’ (polymetis), ‘the man of many twists and turns’ (polytropos), and a score more. No single description suffices. Odysseus is king and sailor, warrior and diplomat, husband and father, beggar and storyteller, trickster and survivor. The first epithet Homer picks out for him, polytropos, has defeated generations of eminent translators. It has been rendered, among others, as ‘much-wandering’, ‘complicated’, ‘resourceful’, ‘versatile’, and ‘of many twists and turns’. All capture something of Homer’s meaning, but none exhaust it. Whereas Achilles burns with a single, blinding excellence, Odysseus is of many parts. He changes with circumstance without ceasing to be himself.

Nowhere is this more delightfully illustrated than in the adventure with the Cyclops. Trapped inside the cave of Polyphemus, with no hope of overcoming the giant by force, Odysseus reaches for his greatest weapon: not his sword, but his wits. When asked his name, he replies, ‘Nobody.’ It is one of the oldest jokes in literature, and has scarcely aged. When the blinded Cyclops bellows that ‘Nobody’ has attacked him, his neighbours abandon him to his fate. Yet there are hidden depths to the comedy. Although Homer gives Odysseus more names than anyone else, the man’s greatest triumph comes from altogether surrendering his name. He survives by becoming Nobody. Only when his ship has safely put out to sea does he make the mistake of shouting his true name back across the waves. For one irresistible moment, the old heroic code reasserts itself—inviting Poseidon’s vengeance and prolonging the homeward journey by ten more years.

Here, perhaps, we arrive at the deepest difference between Homer’s two great heroes. Achilles is the supreme warrior, swift-footed and godlike, the embodiment of an aristocratic world in which honour is won on the battlefield and a glorious death is preferable to an obscure life. Faced with the choice between longevity and everlasting fame, he chooses fame without hesitation. Odysseus belongs to the same heroic age, yet already points beyond it. He fights not to die gloriously, but to live. His greatest victories are won not by brute strength but slippery guile. A civilisation founded upon Achilles would always risk being at war. A civilisation founded upon Odysseus might one day know peace and prosperity.

Again and again, Homer shows us what Odysseus longs for. Not glory. Not pleasure. Not even immortality. Home. When Calypso offers him eternal youth and everlasting life, he refuses. He knows that Penelope has grown older during his absence, and that she cannot offer him the eternal youth of an immortal goddess. Yet he pines for her all the same. He longs for Telemachus, for the columns of smoke rising above Ithaca, for the domestic life he left behind. Homer gives us one unforgettable image of the meaning of home. When Penelope, still testing the stranger before her, orders a servant to move their marriage bed, Odysseus protests that the bed cannot be displaced. For it was he who, long ago, fashioned it around the living trunk of an olive tree. Home, Homer suggests, is something like that, something living and deeply rooted, something that binds and shapes us. If Achilles seeks to transcend the human condition, Odysseus embraces it.

Perhaps that is why we feel so close to him. Homer never presents Odysseus as an invulnerable hero. He is brave, but he is also afraid; ingenious, yet capable of foolishness; resilient, yet often overwhelmed by grief. Indeed, the first time we meet him he is not fighting monsters but sitting alone on Calypso’s island, gazing across the sea towards Ithaca. Later he weeps again as the bard Demodocus sings of Troy, unable to hear his own story without reliving its pain. Homer never hides his hero’s tears, because he understands that strength and sorrow are not opposites but companions.

Perhaps this is also why Homer has a soft spot for him. We might admire Achilles, but we love Odysseus. Achilles may dazzle us, but he would also kill and dismember us, whereas Odysseus would sit down and tell us a story. Homer delights in his resourcefulness—which is, of course, a reflection of his own—but lingers just as tenderly over the moments of recognition that punctuate the poem. None is more moving than the meeting with Argos. Twenty years have passed since Odysseus sailed for Troy. The old hunting dog now lies neglected on a dung heap outside the palace, blind, flea-ridden, and too weak to stand. Yet as Odysseus approaches, disguised as a beggar, Argos lifts his head. He knows. His tail gives a final wag. Then he dies. Odysseus cannot embrace him. To reveal himself would be to risk everything. He can only turn away and brush a tear from his cheek.

We think of Odysseus as one of Homer’s two great heroes. Yet, he scarcely resembles the archetypal hero of myth. Lord Raglan famously identified twenty-two recurring features of mythical and legendary heroes, among them a miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, royal destiny, victory over monsters, a mysterious or sacrificial death… Figures such as Moses and Oedipus satisfy most of these criteria. Odysseus fulfils only eight. By the standards of comparative mythology, the greatest hero in Western literature turns out to be strangely incomplete. Which is, of course, precisely the point. He is no miracle child, no predestined saviour, no invulnerable demigod. He is simply a man—of exceptional intelligence and resilience, certainly, but recognisably human throughout.

For all its monsters, enchantresses, storms, and marvels, the Odyssey is not ultimately a poem about adventure. It is a poem about home: about memory, fidelity, identity, and belonging. Odysseus does not journey merely to recover his kingdom. He journeys to recover himself. This is why the Odyssey still speaks to us.

Or perhaps that is only part of the explanation. For many tales have been told of exile and homecoming. Many heroes have endured suffering, temptation, and loss. This raises another question. Why did this particular story become one of the foundational stories by which an entire civilisation came to understand itself?

The answer cannot simply be that the Odyssey is a great poem. Great stories abound. Homer became much more than a great storyteller. He became the educator of Greece. Long before Socrates knocked about, generations of Greeks had learnt from Homer what courage looked like, what honour demanded, what it meant to be a husband, a father, a king, a host, a guest—even what it meant to be human. His poems furnished the imaginative material from which philosophy itself would arise.

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates often begins an investigation with a Homeric commonplace. Plato himself repeatedly challenged Homer, even proposing, in the Republic, to banish poets (meaning mainly Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides) from his ideal city. Yet, Plato quotes Homer so frequently that he seems unable to think without him. Even as he seeks to supplant Homer as Greece’s teacher, he continues to converse with him. Aristotle is more admiring, praising Homer as the unsurpassed master of epic poetry. The three greatest philosophers of antiquity differed profoundly in temperament and outlook. Yet all three remained rooted in Homer, each responding to him in his own way.

That is what distinguishes a foundational story from a work of literature, however great it might be. It does not merely entertain or even inspire. It furnishes the imaginative world within which a civilisation comes to understand itself. Successive generations may react to it, reinterpret it, or seek, like Plato, to transcend it—but always from within it.

Every civilisation seems to possess one or two such treasures. India has the Mahabharata, Persia, the Shahnameh, the Hebrew world, the stories of the Bible. Remarkably few people, though they may keep a copy, read these vast works from cover to cover. Many Europeans and Americans who revere Homer have never read the Iliad or Odyssey, just as many Indians, though familiar with the Pandava brothers, have never pored over the hundred thousand verses of the Mahabharata. We do not choose these stories any more than we choose our native language. We inherit them. They become part of our mental landscape, furnishing our images, our ideals, and our sense of what it means to be brave, faithful, cunning, or wise.

They are as the sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome: seldom approached, yet somehow reassuring simply because it continues to burn. Quietly, they illuminate the language, values, and images through which successive generations come to understand themselves. Because they are so rich, they are never exhausted. Each age returns to them with new questions and finds new answers.

The history of the Odyssey is, in part, a history of these returns. James Joyce transformed Odysseus into Leopold Bloom, erring not across the wine-dark sea but through the sooty streets of Dublin. Derek Walcott carried the Odyssey to the Caribbean, discovering in it a language for exile, colonialism, and homecoming.

The Odyssey is an ancient poem about one man’s journey home. Perhaps that is why we have never stopped returning to it.

Continue Exploring

If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of how myths become enduring sources of meaning, shaping not only our imagination but the civilisations we inherit.

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