What Odysseus Teaches Us

Welcome back to The Students. The Odyssey is in the news — by Homer. I hear there's a movie. We're not going to talk about that. We're going to talk about the real thing. The Odyssey, and Homer's work in general, is a foundational work of Western literature. It covers many virtues, many of our fundamental myths and tropes that end up in other works all over the place. Certainly worth studying. But our interest here is to study it as a guide to our modern situation, to our future, to our civilization. So I've brought on Stephen Pimentel again to have a conversation about the Odyssey: what we learn from it, and how we should read it. Thank you, Stephen, for coming on. What do we have to know about the Odyssey?

The first thing I would say is: read it. The Odyssey is an outstanding work. It is well worth reading. If some of the recent attention it's gotten from the movie does any good, that would be to drive people to the actual text. Pick up the Odyssey. Pick it up in a good translation. I like Richmond Lattimore's translation. The Fagles translation is often also great. Read it for yourself. Don't trust an adaptation of it. It's well worth reading in its own right.

Yeah, totally. My kids love it. My son listens to it on audiobook. It seems to be for all ages. There are many themes in the Odyssey. It's the aftermath of the Trojan War. Odysseus is trying to come home. He's running into all these obstacles. One of the big themes is hospitality: how he stays with and treats the various people he encounters along the way, how they treat him — and of course contrasted with his home situation, with the suitors, Penelope, Telemachus at Ithaca. But I'm curious: what would you draw out as the most essential themes we should be looking at as we read it?

Returning home

A lot of times people say the core theme of the Odyssey is returning home, the so-called nostos. And that's not wrong. But I think it's easy to view that too literally and too narrowly. It's not simply the physical fact of: well, I'm away from home and I need to return home. It's much more about returning home in this larger, almost metaphorical sense of rebuilding after a huge catastrophe, a huge civilizational-level wreck, which is what the downfall of Troy and its aftermath represented.

Well, it was the Bronze Age collapse. The Bronze Age collapse is that same time, and some people speculate that the fall of Troy may have helped kick that off, or may have been a consequence of things already underway. In any case, it's very much related.

Yeah. The background in the Iliad and in the Odyssey is that the Greeks were raiding all up and down the coast of Asia, and I think at one point Odysseus says that he'd gone down to Egypt even. I think that's very consistent with what we know of the Bronze Age collapse: a whole bunch of those cities were burned in a span of a few years, and there are people in boats running around causing trouble that the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples. So it's after this catastrophe. You don't usually think of it as a catastrophe for the Greeks, obviously, because they beat the Trojans. But as they come home — you've mentioned this — Agamemnon didn't have a very good time of it when he got home. He got murdered by his wife and her suitor, and his son had to avenge that. Meanwhile Odysseus's household is holding out a little better, but Odysseus is taking longer to come home. The subtext is: civilization is collapsing in Ithaca too.

You can view the Iliad and the Odyssey as bookends, where the Iliad is before the fall and the Odyssey is after the fall. It's very interesting that Agamemnon is a bridging character between the two, and this is often missed, because Agamemnon is already dead by the time of the Odyssey, but he is nonetheless a very prominent shadow character in the background of the action. At the very beginning, in book one, the fate of Agamemnon is actually mentioned by Zeus, so it's like this framing thing. Then Agamemnon and his fate repeatedly come up throughout the entire epic. Athena mentions him early on. Another character mentions him to Telemachus. The shade of Agamemnon appears to Odysseus and gives him warning. And every single time he comes up, it's the same theme, the same message. Agamemnon came home, was killed by his wife's lover — Clytemnestra's lover, Aegisthus — and eventually was avenged by Orestes. This is the story that Aeschylus would later write about in the Oresteia, centuries later, in his tragedies. But that myth was already well established in Homer's time, and it gets referred to in the background of the Odyssey. The consistent message to Odysseus is: don't let this happen to you. This could very easily happen to you.

And I think when he comes home and he kills the suitors — the whole retribution on the suitors — some people say, well, why did he have to be so violent? Couldn't he have just come home and announced himself and maybe negotiated with them? The reality is, and the text makes this very clear: he would have been promptly killed if he had tried to do that.

It's an extremely tense situation as he comes home and deals with it. He has to sneak in. He has to be very careful about revealing himself, about when he strikes, making sure that it's all planned, because he's massively overpowered. At the end, when they have the big fight with the rest of the people of the town, effectively, it's Telemachus, Odysseus, and his father fighting against sort of everybody else. And eventually the gods intervene and put an end to that.

So that's in revenge for the killing of the suitors. But like you say, the subtext is they would just kill him if he came back without his men and without the power to compel them.

And Athena is warning Odysseus about this. Even early on in the epic, Athena tells Telemachus that he needs to emulate Orestes and be proactive and not simply sit at home waiting around. So there's this whole framing of: don't be like Agamemnon, don't let what happened to Agamemnon happen to you. That's part of the context of what Odysseus has to deal with. So it's not simply returning home in the sense of a geographic movement. It's this challenge to overcome an entire environment of assaults and obstacles that stand between you and restoring order — restoring order not only to his home, but also to his kingdom. There's this political dimension as well, and it's very much intertwined with the personal and familial dimension. The whole question is: what kind of character, what kind of traits, what kind of virtues does Odysseus need in order to succeed in that super difficult situation?

Metis

Well, it's easy to miss the relevance of this to our situation today. We're not coming back after some big war, but nonetheless there's a sense that order in our household has collapsed. Things are upside down. We have to be very careful with how we approach the restoration of justice, the restoration of order, what might happen to us there. This is kind of the implied analysis in talking about it here, but I want to make that more explicit. How do we see the themes of the Odyssey applying to our own time? Because I think that's something to really have in mind as we go and talk about the character of Odysseus or any of these other things.

One of the virtues that Odysseus has and needs in order to succeed is metis, which is sort of practical intelligence under duress. Many people will accuse Odysseus of being a liar, or very free to use deception. But if you go through the text, in most of those cases he's doing what he needs to navigate around forces sometimes more powerful than him in order to come out on the other side. If you look at our situation, we're dealing with dysfunctional institutions at many levels, governmental and otherwise. Sometimes in a merely annoying and inert kind of way, but sometimes in an actively hostile kind of way. It depends on the situation and the level you're dealing with. I think it's very much the case that we need metis. We need to have some cunning, some practical intelligence about how we expose ourselves, how we bring ourselves to the attention of institutions, how we interact with them. I think it's all very much applicable.

Yeah — hiding your power level, being strategic, maneuvering the situation in ways that other people don't necessarily see or understand. That's a huge part. Odysseus makes a great display of this as he comes back to Ithaca. He puts all his little pieces in place before anyone even knows what's going on. And then very suddenly he's able to make good on all of that.

He plans and he executes, and he does not value shows of force prior to being prepared to actually execute on them.

Yeah, exactly. He's not a flashy guy. He's not a proud guy. He's not marching around complaining about things. He's maneuvering things.

And that's an interesting question of what's necessary at any given time. It's implied in the Odyssey that that was the necessary virtue to come back successfully from the war. But at times it does take building up momentum with shows of force or demonstrations, or appeals to justice publicly. Telemachus tries this at the beginning, if only to just state his case and let there be justice to it. It's not unprovoked. He states his case right at the beginning: you guys are abusing the household, you're eating our food, you're desecrating the memory of Odysseus, you need to get out. That's the first thing Athena has him do — state the case justly. But that doesn't work.

We could get into the whole matter of what's necessary in our time. There's always this question of what time it is. Who are you, and what time is it? If you are the king exercising your rule, then there may be times when visible displays of sovereignty are actually a good thing. If you are not yet in a position of rule because you've been displaced from it unjustly, or for whatever reason, you may not want those kinds of displays prior to being able to make them effective.

Yeah, especially when — this is his case — the real threat he represents is he's not just a beggar, he's actually the king. He actually does have a right. And because he has a right, he would have to be killed, or surrendered to. The suitors can't just ignore him if they know who he is.

So it's this complex situation. Violations of hospitality I think are also very salient in our time. People have compared this to the whole situation with mass immigration, with some of the fraud related to that. I remember when people were comparing the Minnesota Somali fraud situation some months ago to Odysseus's Ithaca situation. You've got these people, they're kind of abusing hospitality, and it cries out for some kind of retribution. People were very worked up about it. There are a lot of these parallels of various types. But maybe we should go back into the story itself, the themes of the story itself, really establish our understanding, and then bring those virtues and lessons into our time.

The sequence of challenges

Okay. I think one interesting avenue into that is to look at the sequence of challenges that Odysseus faces. What are the things that are impeding him? Why does it take ten years to make this journey that, geographically, could have been made much more quickly? You see this whole sequence of being captured by Calypso, the Lotus-Eaters, Circe, and each of these is posing some sort of challenge. Calypso offers him immortality, which in effect is basically the temptation to just abandon the game — to leave history, to leave his mortal life altogether. He might as well not be there. He's not going to be a player anymore. He's not going to be an agent within the human world. And he turns that down.

After seven years.

Yeah, yeah. It's not that he wasn't tempted. People say, well, how could you turn down immortality? And I think it's just this matter of engagement with his actual world. His memory of who he is, who he came from, his identity on Ithaca, his wife, his son, his father, his kingdom. He was like: no, I do want to not merely return to those things, but rebuild, reestablish those things, exercise my agency in the human realm to build what can be built.

The Lotus-Eaters is very directly an attack on memory. You take this drug, you forget. You forget who you are, you forget where you came from, you forget that there's a world beyond that you could be acting in and engaging in. And he has to refuse that forgetting. That forgetting would in effect be a kind of annihilation, a kind of almost like suicide. Because as a human being, you truly have no identity but for that web of relations. To completely leave them behind in forgetting would just be self-destruction.

Right. It's another form of annihilation.

And I think all of the different challenges you can see as some sort of attack. The eating of the cattle of Helios that his men do — that is very important. It is mentioned right in the prologue in book one as sort of framing the whole thing.

It's sort of the disorder of his men, isn't it?

Exactly. But in a way that relates to this whole question of xenia. They did to Helios what the suitors were doing to Odysseus back home on Ithaca. They were eating what they did not have a right to eat. They showed up someplace and consumed someone else's goods inappropriately. In the case of the cattle of Helios, they're obviously violating this divine order. But I think the real message of that is that the divine order of xenia sort of is the human order of xenia. That xenia, even on its human dimensions, is sacred to the gods precisely because it is this anchor of how one should and should not live.

Yeah. The gods often show up as beggars, or as some stranger, in these stories. And this is part of the whole theme of hospitality: you should be generous to the stranger, feed them before you know who they are, because you don't know who they are — they could be a god. That's the flip side. Odysseus and his men abusing the hospitality of Helios, and then Athena comes and gets dinner at Ithaca, right at the beginning.

And then of course you have the famous episode with the Cyclops, where the Cyclops obviously violates xenia. In fact Odysseus attempts to invoke xenia. He specifically said: we are your guests, please treat us well, maybe even give us a little bit of wine or something.

Well, they're trading the wine for the milk and the cheese.

Yeah, that's right. And instead he proceeds to eat the men, which is not very hospitable. But this also illustrates that Odysseus is far from perfect. He's not a moral exemplar. He is a hero, but his heroism is not of a moral kind, especially from a Christian perspective. When after they're escaping, he cannot resist boasting and finally telling the Cyclops his name — in order to gain glory for himself. A little bit of an echo with Achilles here.

It's an interesting contrast with what you were saying about metis and the crafting of Odysseus. The one time that he approaches a situation with hubris, it kind of blows out his world for the next ten years.

That's right, because it angers Poseidon. Polyphemus curses him to his father Poseidon. Poseidon then imposes the additional years of suffering. That's a failure of metis. Odysseus would have done a lot better if he had been more consistent.

It only takes one slip-up.

Right. But then we wouldn't have a story.

That's right.

Circe and the Phaeacians

Yeah. These have been great little analyses of the meaning of the different hospitality episodes in the Odyssey. The two that I'm thinking of now are Circe and the Phaeacians. He comes to Circe and his men fall to her temptation, get turned into animals or whatever it is. But he is able, through comprehension of nature, physis, of the plant that's taught to him by Hermes, to overcome her charms and resolve that situation. And then with the Phaeacians, he washes up on the beach, meets Nausicaa, and from this position of the arriving beggar — them treating him well as a guest, him treating them well as a guest — he's able to reestablish his identity as a king, as this lost guy Odysseus. Then finally they send him home with the ship and the provisions. And that's finally when he's successful in getting home: this episode of things having been done well.

That's a great framing. The whole Circe episode is fascinating, and we could have a whole talk just on that. Initially the men go into her. They hear her singing. They're enchanted by it. And she gives them this mixed brew containing, the text says, wicked drugs, which turn them into pigs — or at least that is the report. There are different interpretations.

Right, because this is of course being told by Odysseus at the hall of the Phaeacians.

And Odysseus didn't even witness this. It was first told to him by the one guy who didn't join the crew going into Circe, but who stayed outside and spied on them. While he supposedly saw what was going on, he panics and runs back to Odysseus and tells Odysseus the story about them being turned into pigs. They're actually getting it third-hand, when Odysseus finally tells the story. And Odysseus says, well, I just need to go rescue them. The dude's all panicked out. He doesn't want to help. But in approaching the palace, Odysseus is intercepted by Hermes, who points out to him a particular plant. It's the moly plant — we say moly in English. Not MDMA. Much older word. And this is the antidote to her drugged brew.

This is one of the first uses of the word phusis that we have in Greek, where in learning the nature of the plant, he is able to understand and avoid her entrapment. Some scholars have claimed this is a major advance in thought: understanding that things in fact have natures, that plants have a stable character or nature — and not just plants but obviously animals and ultimately humans as well — that is not simply utterly fluid, but that one could come to learn about, ultimately through scientific investigation. But that's jumping way ahead.

Right. It's an interesting precursor to this theme of the triumph of rational understanding and science over this heavy magical primordial complex of temptation and transformation.

And very appropriate that it's Odysseus who first undergoes that, or understands that, because phronesis and metis, this more intelligent understanding of the world, are his virtues. So it fits that he'd be the guy that first understands this.

Right. It's his kind of intelligence, as opposed to Achilles or Agamemnon or one of these guys.

Yeah. Then the Phaeacians. Some people claim that Odysseus is making up the whole rest of the story as he's telling them. He's telling them this cooked story because he doesn't want to talk about what actually happened, which is maybe what he told the swineherd about Egypt — getting captured in Egypt — or some other story, just the actual reality of they went and raided down the coast and burned down a city. Or I hung out with a woman for seven years, until he got bored of that. I'm curious what you make of that episode with Nausicaa. People have speculated that Nausicaa is Homer's self-insert. There's tons of complexity there.

There's all kinds of metatextual things, where there's the bard within the Odyssey at one point. And then of course Odysseus himself is telling the tale that Homer is telling us, or part of the tale that Homer is telling us. It's very sophisticated in its construction. People sometimes use the term postmodern, but that's kind of a ridiculous term when you realize that Homer used these same techniques, and so did Cervantes, and so did many, many other great authors. I think the truth is simply that great authors have always had access to this kind of complex narrative, metatextual tale-telling technique.

But I do think there's something to the notion of Odysseus narrating his own story and being the creator, in a sense, of his own story. Not in some cynical "well, it's all lies, or he just made it all up" — although maybe he did make up some parts. But the fact that he's fundamentally an active character. The whole return is basically an exercise of endurance, of overcoming obstacles and hardships in order to achieve what he wanted to achieve, which was returning to his kingdom and rebuilding it. And that itself is a kind of echo of this storytelling. He's like: no, I am going to exercise agency. I am going to construct my own story as best as I am able to — which is not a hundred percent. No one can do that a hundred percent, because you're living in an external world. There are other people. There are the gods. There are storms. There's tremendous adversity. Eventually you will grow old and die. That's what he's chosen. But that's okay. That doesn't mean that he can't continue to fight, that he can't continue to navigate — and I don't just mean on his boat. I mean intellectually, in terms of how he needs to problem-solve, how he needs to use force very, very carefully and selectively. I just think it's a wonderful illustration of all those things.

One of the things that always struck me is this little running theme in the Odyssey of people recognizing nobility in others. Like on the beach. When he gets washed up, he's lost everything. He's naked. He's been at sea forever. He's haggard, covered in seaweed and salt. And Nausicaa recognizes him as a king.

That guy looks like a king.

And so it's this commentary from Homer that the kingly nature is not in any of these trappings. It's not in the surrounding social position of the person. It's coming directly from his nature, from his bearing. And similarly, when Telemachus shows up at Sparta, and I think possibly Pylos as well, he's immediately recognized as: oh, you guys are princes of some kind. Telemachus and Athena, disguised as Mentor.

Phusis shines forth. His nature, his posture, his bearing, his speech. He does not look like a peasant. And she recognizes this correctly.

The return

Then I guess the final episode we should talk more about is the actual return: the crafty maneuvering into that situation, locking all the doors, proving himself by shooting through the axes, whatever that means, and then basically turning around and slaughtering the suitors. I think for a modern audience that's one of the most challenging aspects of the whole thing. We're very trained: don't react in anger, don't take it out, don't do collective punishment, try to see the innocence of the slave girls or the minor figures among the suitors. But it's presented as righteous by Homer that Odysseus comes back and just kills absolutely everybody who'd been abusing the situation. I think it's one of the most morally charged aspects of the story. I haven't seen it treated with its full reality in adaptations.

Yes, it is a very bloody scene. Going to the end of it, I would simply note a couple of things. One: he does not have all the slave women killed, only those who collaborated with the abusive suitors. And he actually rebukes one of the servants who is laughing with glee in the aftermath of it, looking at all the dead bodies. He says this is no occasion for glee. This was retribution that was needed to restore order. These people brought their fate upon themselves through their great offense against xenia and to the gods. But there's nothing gleeful about it.

Yeah. They've just lost another generation of men from the whole town.

It's serious. It's obviously undesirable in that respect. All the men that Odysseus left with have been lost, and now another crew has been lost. I think the best way to view that is that these were people who were clearly set on his death, who clearly would have killed him if given the opportunity. And that he calculated: how can I succeed in reestablishing rule over the palace — it may sound strange to say, but I think it's actually accurate — using the minimal force necessary to effectively do that.

Sometimes that's a lot.

Yeah. But if you look at the number of people he had on his side, there was Telemachus, there was himself. It's not like he had some whole army to surround the palace and then just mete out punishment. This was what was necessary to overcome them. If we want to look at a challenging message, I think one of the messages that Homer does in fact intend here is that retribution is sometimes part of justice. It is simply not true that retribution is always wrong, or that justice can always be adequately served without it. There are some situations in which retribution is in fact part of justice.

It's necessary to restore order.

That should not be allowed to run loose in an unbounded manner. And we see that at the end, where there's potential further warfare with the families of the people who were killed, and the gods step in and say: no, enough. That's enough of that. This is the limit. We establish peace now. Retribution should serve the restoration of order. It should not just become this kind of feud-fighting where you're going at it generation to generation.

It can, but you don't want it to, because that's really bad. It mustn't be allowed to.

A call to seriousness

So I'm curious, then: bring all these lessons back to our own time, back to our own situation. We are in a broken house to some extent. How do we restore order in our kingdom? What does that look like for us? What virtues are necessary for us? If a young man reading the Odyssey today reads it with that in mind, what does he learn and how does he apply it?

I think it's a call to seriousness. I think it's a call to engagement. I think it's a call to the cultivation of a very practical intelligence in navigating difficult situations. You cannot assume the world is always friendly. We're going to encounter situations with institutions that are not friendly. Some of them are very dysfunctional, as I said before; some of them are hostile. And you don't simply respond to that with anger or abuse. Don't be like Odysseus trying to sail away from the Cyclops — "it was me, Odysseus" — you just want to shout abuse. No. Leave that off. You're not going to help yourself that way. But do learn to navigate.

And this whole aspect of memory I think is a really important theme. You cannot restore something if you do not remember what it was. You cannot build or rebuild if you have no notion of the kinds of relationships that you're trying to build or rebuild. For Odysseus, this includes family: his wife, his son, his father, the dead to whom he owes respect, his kingdom. There's this integrated familial and political aspect. All of this is part of his identity and memory.

This is maybe another reason to read the Iliad and the Odyssey. It's this foundational work of Western literature. In reading we see: these people aren't exactly our ancestors, but they're related to our ancestors, and we descend from them intellectually at the very least. It shows this other world, something that some of us had. And when you go and read, compare it with Beowulf, with the Germanic epics, with other things in our cultural heritage, the same themes, the same kind of patterns emerge, and you realize: oh wow, there was something. You restore that memory of who we are, what our civilization is based on, what it's been through, where it came from — that whole memory complex. And I think that's very important as well.

There's so much of the information-control system, the way that people end up trapped in the myths of the day, or trapped in what almost amounts to slavery in the matrix. So much of that is just having accepted sources of understanding of who you are and where you came from and what the past looks like that are controlled by your enemies, that cut you off from that. If you don't know who you are, you don't know what you had, you don't know where it came from, you're weak and manipulable. But if you do have that, it makes you very, very strong.

I remember one of my favorite articles with Palladium was about living in the golden age of heroism. You get these great men like Cortés or Caesar or Napoleon, and they're not contemporaries with their contemporaries, if you know what I mean. They're reading these deep memories of the past. Napoleon studying Caesar's battles. Cortés comparing himself to Achilles and Alexander. In accessing that memory they realize they're actually part of something bigger. They're part of a larger space of possibilities, and they're given power in the world as a result of that. Not to say that everyone who reads the Odyssey is going to become Napoleon. But there's this leverage on the world that you get by knowing these things. And this is maybe why the study of these works has been called the liberal arts. These are the works that will make you free if you understand them, because they give you that grounding, that understanding, that history. It's interesting to compare that meta note of why we read this stuff with the themes in the work itself: telling the stories, and remembering who he is.

The great men have more in common with each other than with their immediate contemporaries. And that's true of the great authors as well. Because they're plugged into this unified tradition of the memory of greatness, whereas the contemporary kind of shifts all over the place.

One of the things I'd say about Homer is: don't be afraid of his strangeness. His strangeness is actually a benefit. His strangeness might be a distant memory of your home.

It's not actually strangeness. You're just used to strangeness. You are the strange one. You need to be estranged in order to see it. Homer is normal. Homer is the return to normalcy.

Homer is real. You aren't.

Well — people try to deconstruct the idea of Homer, the sage guy, into just a tradition. It all seems kind of silly to me. Homer, and especially the Odyssey, is the story of the return to normalcy. You return to normalcy by reading the Odyssey and understanding it from your heart.

But a particular kind of normalcy. This very highly agentic, we're-going-to-rebuild kind of normalcy.

Yeah. The normalcy of great agency.

Well, maybe we can leave it at that. This has been a great survey of the Odyssey. It certainly inspired me to go back and look at these themes again, read it with my son.

Yeah, I think it's great. You should do that.

And I hope the audience is inspired as well to pick up a book — the real book — and start that journey into understanding our own foundations, our own mythical foundations, our own historical foundations, and our memories of who we are through works like the Odyssey.