The Odyssey and the long journey home from war

Adam Johannes

The Odyssey is a story about nostos, the ancient Greek idea of homecoming.

Odysseus longs to return to Ithaca. He wants to see his wife and son, to see even the smoke rising from his own homeland: “No country could be sweeter.” But the journey home is not a journey back to innocence. It cannot restore the past. The man who leaves is not the man who returns.

Odysseus left his home to fight in a war. He returns twenty years later, carrying the war inside him.

This is what makes The Odyssey more than an adventure story. It is a story about what war does to human beings, the long, often invisible aftermath of violence, and what happens when the weapons fall silent but the war continues inside the mind.

The Iliad is the epic of war, a world of glory, honour, conquest and death, where young men are taught that dying for a cause can give meaning to death. The Odyssey starts where the war ends. It asks: what happens to the human being who survives it?

Odysseus has lived through violence, loss, temptation and the destruction of the world he once knew. He has encountered monsters, the dead and the forces within himself that threaten to consume him.

The world through which he travels is strange and terrifying, but the deeper journey is into the darkness within himself. The most dangerous threat is not always the monster. At every stage, Odysseus is confronted with the possibility of forgetting who he is and where he belongs.

The Lotus Eaters offer Odysseus’s men the possibility of abandoning the journey altogether. They eat the lotus and forget home. They lose both the desire and the will to struggle or remember. They want only to stay where they are. When suffering becomes overwhelming, forgetting can seem easier than remembering. To come home, one must believe there is a home to return to.

The world of the Lotus Eaters is not hard to recognise. Our own world has developed more sophisticated ways of offering the same escape. It teaches us how to consume, compete and perform, how to appear successful, hide our wounds and turn suffering into private shame.

But it does not teach us how to come home.

Calypso offers Odysseus another kind of escape. He could remain forever on a beautiful island with a goddess who loves him, escaping ageing and death. Ithaca offers uncertainty, suffering and mortality. But it is home. Odysseus refuses the possibility of escaping the human condition. He chooses the difficult, imperfect world to which he belongs.

Suffering

The Odyssey speaks powerfully to the experience of the combat veteran, and to anyone forced by suffering into a place from which they cannot simply return unchanged. It is the story of a man separated from himself, his family and community, who must somehow find his way back.

The monsters are not just monsters. They are also the landscape of the wounded mind.

Odysseus must speak with the dead. There is no escape from this encounter. The dead must be remembered. The lost must be mourned. Grief we refuse to confront does not disappear. It waits for us. The journey home requires us to acknowledge what we have lost.

The danger of The Odyssey is that we read it as too simple a story of restoration. Odysseus leaves home, suffers, overcomes his trials and returns. But the poem is darker. The man who returns has been shaped by violence, deception, loss and survival. He has learned to conceal his identity, to lie and to kill. The war has not simply happened to Odysseus. It has helped make him.

This is the question at the heart of his homecoming: can a man shaped by violence return to a world that has not shared his experience and live peacefully within it?

Vietnam veterans

Dr Jonathan Shay, in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, reads the poem through the experience of Vietnam veterans. He draws attention to the final violence of the poem, when Odysseus returns home and slaughters the suitors, reading it as a warning about the way unresolved wartime rage can devastate domestic life.

The violence of war does not necessarily end when the soldier returns. It can be carried into the home and inflicted upon those who were never present on the battlefield. The suitors are not innocent. They have occupied Odysseus’s home, consumed his wealth and threatened his family and kingdom. But the ending remains troubling. Odysseus does not return as a man who has transcended violence. He returns through violence.

This is one of the great crimes of militarism. It sends human beings into violence and then abandons them to deal with the consequences. It celebrates the warrior while neglecting the wounded. It turns the destruction of distant societies into patriotic spectacle and then refuses to acknowledge the destruction carried home.

When Odysseus finally reaches home, home is no longer simple. The world he returns to has continued without him. His family has endured his absence. The people he returns to have lived without him. He has lived without them. The distance between them is not only geographical. It is emotional, moral and spiritual.

Memory

The home he longs for exists partly in memory. But memory is treacherous. It preserves what we want to remember, and buries what we cannot bear to confront. It can create an image of a world that never existed in the way we imagine it.

That is why the idea of nostos matters. Homecoming is not a return to the past. We are changed by what happens to us. The people we love change too. The world changes. But we do not have to become only what has been done to us.

Homecoming is the difficult work of rebuilding a life among the ruins and repairing what can still be repaired, knowing that neither we nor the world to which we return can ever be what we were. It is the long journey back from exile.

Maybe that is why The Odyssey still matters. Because all of us, at some point in our lives, may need to find our way home.

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