Homer’s The Odyssey
“Sing for our time too,” says Homer to his muse at the outset of his epic poem The Odyssey. Almost three millennia after it was written, she still does.
The first word of Homer’s poem is “man.” This is telling, because Odysseus, a famous war hero whom Homer describes at the outset as polytropos (“a man of many ways”), is not just any man. He is a wise and cunning man. A sophisticated man. Odysseus’s character has been the subject of unending critique. A bit of a trickster, like Jacob, he is nonetheless beloved by the goddess of wisdom.
In one episode, Odysseus confronts a one-eyed monster who boasts that his name is Polyphemus (Gr. “much spoken of”) and then asks Odysseus to reveal his identity in return. The famously cagey Odysseus tells him, with no small measure of irony, that his name is Nobody.
We marvel at Odysseus’s foresight shortly thereafter, because after he and his men blind Polyphemus to escape being eaten, the monster cries out to his neighbours for help, announcing that “Nobody” is attacking him. His neighbours naturally refuse to come to his aid.
The man of many ways defeats the proud, myopic beast through his wise discretion.
We think we know The Odyssey and what it is about. Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan, whose film The Odyssey is now playing in theatres, voices the consensus view when he calls it “the ultimate adventure story.”
But what if we’ve misunderstood the famous poem? What if Homer never intended to tell the ultimate adventure story? What if his aim was not merely to entertain us?
It is the great philosopher Plato who directs us toward a better understanding. In The Republic, Socrates notes that his contemporaries call Homer “the educator of Hellas.” Elsewhere, Aristotle calls him “the teacher.” This was the consensus view among the Greeks.
Such statements emphasizing Homer as a teacher sound strange to our ears today.
We think education happens through textbooks, in schools, or in universities. Education has become an industry. Literature, meanwhile, is there simply for entertainment. An artist can say whatever he wants. It’s just art. It doesn’t educate us.
The Greeks, however, understood education less as the dissemination (or production) of knowledge than as a process of training in wisdom and virtue. They knew the power of stories to shape people’s souls. Good stories, like Homer’s, form character. They model a path of wisdom and virtue, even when the main character himself struggles with both.
Children learn to imitate courage by observing Achilles.
They learn wisdom through Mentor.
Prudence and discernment through Odysseus.
Fidelity through Penelope.
Hospitality through Eumaeus.
Long before philosophy analysed virtue, Homer gave us its personifications. And since, as Aristotle observed, humans are the most imitative of all creatures, learn their earliest lessons through imitation, and inherently take pleasure in viewing imitations, it stands to reason that a great poet like Homer is the best kind of teacher.
We take delight as he teaches.
Regarding Homer as a teacher completely changes how we read The Odyssey. It is the reason Homer’s muse still sings. He does not merely delight us. He teaches us what it means to be human.
If Homer is a teacher, then, and Odysseus is his model of wisdom, we must understand Homer as a teacher of wisdom.
What, then, is Homer teaching, and how does he do it?
Homer is educating desire
Desire is a scarlet thread running throughout Homer’s epics. Paris’s illicit desire for Helen provoked a war that destroyed Troy. Homer is not merely warning us of the malign influence of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. It is Paris’s preference for lust over wisdom that is at issue. Men who do not check their appetites are on the same path to destruction. We must learn to love wisdom, as Odysseus does.
The monsters Odysseus confronts are not merely creatures. They represent temptations.
Calypso tempts Odysseus with eternal comfort without duty. The Lotus Eaters tempt men to forget their painful past. Circe offers a thoughtless enslavement to appetite. Scylla and Charybdis tempt us to see life as a choice between lesser evils. The Sirens offer the hubris of immortal fame, but without the things that make a human life complete—a family, a household, a city, and the inheritance of a name of which to be proud.
Every episode asks the same question: Who or what rules the soul?
To reduce Homer’s Odyssey to a mere adventure story is like seeing Nobody as its protagonist. Homer’s Odyssey is no mere adventure story.
It is a psychagogy, a “journey of the soul.”
Homer Inspires Plato
“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” ~ Alfred North Whitehead
Plato describes the soul (Gr. psyche) as consisting of three parts, each with a drive that puts it at odds with the others. In the Phaedrus, Plato compares the human soul to a chariot guided by a charioteer. The charioteer represents reason and controls two horses. One horse (the white one) is noble and good, representing virtue and obedience to reason. The other horse (the dark one) is wild and unruly, representing lawless physical desires. The charioteer must work hard to keep both horses under control and moving toward truth.
The aim is control and balance.
In The Republic, Plato constructs an entire city to illustrate this tripartite soul (reason, spirit, and appetite), complete with its three corresponding civic functions (ruler, guardian, and producer). While each part of the soul serves its own function and must be given its due, Plato maintains that for an individual to possess a well-ordered soul and live a just and harmonious life, reason must govern the other two parts, with spirit supporting its rule.
Political scientists will discuss the civic consequences of Homer’s teaching.
Plato, however, is more interested in the individual soul, and the purpose of his city analogy is to make its workings “easier to see.” In The Republic, Plato is more explicit in portraying the “monstrous” character of the appetites:
Where did he get this idea of the many kinds of monsters that oppose the man of wisdom? Surely, he got it from Homer, “the educator of Greece.”
Odysseus is an extraordinarily calculating man, yet he succeeds only when his reason governs him. His men, on the other hand, succumb to the monsters because they allow their appetites to rule them.
If the Western philosophical tradition is a series of footnotes to Plato, its unacknowledged teacher is Homer. The journey of the soul that lies at the heart of Plato’s philosophical analysis was first mapped out in Odysseus’s grand adventure.
Why does the Odyssey still matter?
It isn’t merely because of its adventure, but because it sings of human nature in a symphony of meaningful images. It encompasses the gods and the Underworld.
And human nature has not changed.
The Odyssey captivates us today, just as it did Homer’s original audience, because we have made NO progress in changing who we are.
We still face Lotus Eaters. Life’s traumas make us want to forget what has happened rather than gain wisdom from it. Many turn to drugs or develop self-destructive habits to avoid confronting their terrible and terrifying experiences.
We still face Sirens. People (and social media) make us fixate on our public image at the expense of those nearest and dearest to us. A life tied to a mast upon the wine-dark sea.
We still face Circe. We devote ourselves to a life of consumption, sparing ourselves the trouble of thinking about whether vice or virtue still matter.
We still face Cyclopes. Many cynical people call us to live a life without the order of civilization, which they insist is only bad. Our Cyclopes would have us live without technology, ignore the reality of good and evil, and ridicule the gods.
They shout, “Hey ho, hey ho, Western civ has got to go!” Like John Lennon in his song “Imagine,” they envision a world with “no Heaven,” “no Hell below us,” and “above us only sky.”
In that sense, Homer’s world is our world.
Only the names have changed.
Our monsters are distraction. Consumerism. Pornography. Power. Ideology. Comfort.
Homer’s questions have not ceased to be relevant. In fact, he has helped us identify our own monsters and given us a model for how to overcome them.
What kind of person are you becoming?
The Odyssey has not been lauded merely because it tells the spectacular tale of how one extraordinary man found his way home.
It still sings because it teaches us how we, too, can find our way home—as Odysseus did.
Not to Ithaca, but to a rightly ordered soul.
To read Dr. Scott Masson’s articles on The Odyssey, visit his webpage by clicking here.