The Odyssey

Themes · The Odyssey

The ideas it keeps circling back to.

1. 01

   Homecoming, and what is left to come home to

   The Greek word is *nostos*, the return, and it is the engine of the whole poem. But Homer is careful never to make it simple. Odysseus is offered immortality and refuses it for a small rocky island. When he finally arrives he does not recognise the place, and nobody recognises him. Ten more books pass before he can sleep in his own bed. The poem's real subject is not the journey home but the discovery that arriving and belonging are two different events.

2. 02

   Cunning as a virtue and a fault

   Odysseus is defined by his mind. He is the man of many turns, the one who thinks his way out. The poem clearly admires this: the wooden horse, the name Nobody, the endless invented life stories. But it also shows the bill. His pride in his own cleverness makes him shout his name at the Cyclops, and that single boast costs him ten years and every man he commands. The Odyssey praises intelligence and refuses to pretend it comes free.

3. 03

   Hospitality as the test of a civilisation

   *Xenia*, the guest-host bond, is how this poem measures people. Feed the stranger before you ask his name and you are civilised. The Phaeacians do it, Nestor does it, the swineherd Eumaeus does it while owning almost nothing. The Cyclops eats his guests. The suitors invert it completely by becoming guests who devour their host's house. When Odysseus finally kills them, the poem frames it as the punishment of men who broke the one rule everyone in this world agrees on.

4. 04

   Identity, disguise, and the name you give

   Almost nobody in this poem is straightforwardly themselves. Athena appears as a family friend, a shepherd, a girl. Odysseus is a beggar, a Cretan wanderer, Nobody. Names are given, withheld, and weaponised. The question that runs underneath is whether a self survives twenty years of pretending. The poem's answer is physical rather than philosophical: the scar, the bow only he can string, the bed only he could have built.

5. 05

   Loyalty, and the cost of waiting

   The poem is as interested in the people who stayed as the man who left. Penelope holds a household together for twenty years with nothing but delay and intelligence. Eumaeus keeps working the pigs for a master he assumes is dead. Argos waits on a dung heap and dies the moment he is rewarded. Against them stand the suitors and the twelve women, and the poem's judgement on disloyalty is brutal and unsentimental.

6. 06

   Storytelling and the unreliable teller

   The most famous four books of the Odyssey are spoken by Odysseus, at a dinner party, to people he needs a ship from. He lies constantly elsewhere in the poem and is introduced from the first line as a man of tricks. Homer never tells us the monster stories are false. He simply arranges things so that we cannot check. That is a remarkably modern move in the oldest adventure story we have.