Homecoming and Homegoing: Father and Son in the Odyssey

The Odyssey is a curious sort of epic. Unlike the Iliad, which begins with an invocation to the Muse to tell of the rage of Achilles, the Odyssey begins with invoking the Muse to tell the story of a wanderer. It is about a life—one man’s life. Its backdrop, unlike the Iliad, is set against peace, not war. But what a peace it is. Within its shadows live all the elements of war. The sorceress Circe turns his men into swine, and he has to live with her for a year, make love to her, beg her to turn them back into men again. Beautiful Calypso, who fell in love with him, and with whom he lived for seven years, promises him immortality if he stays. Odysseus pleads, saying that though his Penelope cannot compare with her, he must return home. It is his wife who owns his heart. So far, so good. Like all wanderers, Odysseus has his fixed star on his horizon, guiding him back home, to Ithaca, to his life as reigning lord of his realm. 

Its themes are modern, our own: loss of loved ones, suffering because one is far from home, attacks--whether on the subway or on the Aegean Sea—that must be overcome. Children who become adults too soon; wives widowed before their time. Bodies, ashes, the dead, sacrifices, ancestors, ghosts, heroes and antiheroes, thieves and villains, kind hearts offering hospitality, greedy ones that abuse it. Love and its passions, betrayals, lies, truth. We know them well because we, too, have lived them, we, too, have had to endure.

Think of situations in our own lives. A father returns home after seven years in prison. His boy, six when he left, is now thirteen. His father comes towards him, “Hey, hey, my young man, come hug your daddy,” holding out his arms. The young man resists, he’s making adjustments in his mind, he’s holding two things in his head at the same time—how he’s meant to be, and how he is. He’s meant to be a young boy rushing to welcome his father home. But he’s a grown man already, grown too soon. He has been taking care of a sick mother, and a younger sister who needs protection from drug gangs in their neighborhood. He doesn’t know the man who’s come in through their front door. He is angry and fearful. Who is he now? What’s his mission in life? His father’s come home—so he turns into a young boy again? What does that even mean? He’s paralyzed. Fight or flee are his two options. But he must be welcoming, and move aside. Their relationship will forever be moderated by the father’s absence, by the caretaking role the son has assumed for the past seven years.

A son is enlisted in the army. He goes off to fight a war, in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Somalia. He does what he’s supposed to do. When he returns, depending on whether it was a good war, a war that made the country proud, or brought humiliation, he is welcomed or shunned. He finds his place is gone—he has already been made over to the dead. His parents tell him he’s changed, he’s no longer the son they knew. His girlfriend has married another man; or, if married, his wife may have supposed him dead and begun a new relationship. Who is he? He must find his footing again—no ceremonial welcome for a returning warrior awaits him. He will have to fight to regain his place in his home and society.

The Odyssey begins with the goddess Athena arriving in Ithaca. She assesses the situation for Telemachus, Odysseus’ son. Listen, she tells him, the suitors are eating you out of home and board. Go look for your father, bring him home. Telemachus is managing the situation as best as he can. As the only son of the absent Odysseus, he can order his mother about. Go upstairs, we’ve had enough of you, he tells Penelope at one point. Their roles are now reversed. He is the parent, she, the child. Their relationship is often fraught and tense.

Then Odysseus returns. Homecoming, Nostos, ushered by the gods, and usually greeted with communal pride and honor. But when Telemachus meets his father, he sees a man worn out by battle. Even when clothed like a god by Athena, Odysseus is unrecognizable to his son. It is only when Penelope, who needs the most convincing, recognizes Odysseus as her long-lost husband that Telemachus too begins to believe. The questions he has been asked all along his wanderings come back at Odysseus again now: stranger, who are you? Tell us who your parents are. Give me proof. The answers are not easy—not for him, not for his family. 

The baby is a twenty-year-old. The young man who went to war is old. The two face each other as strangers. The story begins afresh. No one believes that Odysseus, über globetrotter, is going to settle down to home and hearth. That was the ideal that brought him home. I imagine Odysseus as a restless homebody, longing to take his ship out to sea again, to test his mettle against the wild monsters and sorceresses that rule the waves. 

There is the homegoing and then there is the homecoming. The two are very different states of being. Homegoing is an idealized state—it’s the lure, it’s the rope that tugs the ship back home. Homecoming is dealing with it—the changes, the attitudes, the small space you have to squeeze yourself into, the altered home that is no longer the same.

C.P. Cavafy, a twentieth-century Greek poet, gave homegoing its true value: “Keep Ithaka always in your mind,” he wrote. “Arriving there is what you’re destined for.”

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out. 
She has nothing left to give you now.*

All of us on our homegoing journeys—whether to a physical place we call home, or arriving at a place in our lives that we’ve longed for-- will wonder: how will it go now? With Odysseus and his son, and with us. 


*C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems, “Ithaka,” translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975).

Students could explore the following questions:  

• Why do we need heroes and what do they reveal about us? 
• What makes someone - or something - a monster? Do heroes always need monsters? 
• Is pride a bad thing? When does pride help us? When does it hurt us? How can a strength also be a weakness? 
• What do we celebrate? What do we cure? 
• Stranger danger or kindness to strangers: how should we act? 
• Does violence always beget violence?  Can “an eye for an eye” work? 
• Can families survive long separations?

Students could investigate the following understandings:  

• Stories endure because we continue to see ourselves and our world in them.
• Monsters are often metaphors for universal human struggles and temptations.
• Wars rarely end – at least not for the people who live them. 
• Culture informs our values in powerful ways. As humans living in society, we are often impacted by multiple “cultures” at once. What we embrace and what we reject becomes the core of who we are.
• To be a hero is to be extraordinary. Heroes are often either survivors of great odds or fighters who go down in a blaze of glory. Or both.
• Families who’ve experienced long separations often struggle between the imagined ideal and the concrete real.

SOCIAL STUDIES

Map My Journey Home Maps tell stories in a myriad of ways: they reveal the values and perspectives of the mapmaker, they focus on themes/ideas in much the same way a literary text might, they even embrace color and symbolism, albeit at a very literal level. A geography teacher must teach students how to read maps - not simply how to make sense of what is there, but how to identify what has been left out. 

Assignment: Create an annotated map of Odysseus’ journey home. You can start with any of the maps that have already been created to reflect the journey – no need to reinvent the wheel, after all. Consider how the map would look different if drawn and labeled by Odysseus compared to Penelope or one of the gods? Choose a character – Odysseus, Telemachus, or Penelope; one of his men, one of the gods – and create the map from their perspective. Layer in quotes, details, analysis, etc. to show evidence of that perspective. 

Assignment: Create a map of your own journey home. It could be literal, like this example shared by A.G. Lombardo of his students mapping their journeys home from school, “reincarnating the myths into L.A.” (or Topeka or Queens), or metaphoric – is there a journey you’ve been on (or are still on) that feels like Odysseus’ – long, twisted, full of struggle, but with a destination in mind? This might be a goal you’re working towards, like making varsity, earning more responsibility at work or more freedom at home, playing a show with your band, or building followers for your art/music/poetry social media account. Who are your Lotus Eaters or Calypsos? Who are your Cyclops?

The Philosophy of Money Homer’s epic is the oldest resource we have of daily life in Ancient Greece. There are many similarities and universal truths that bridge the time between Homer’s era and ours, but there are also some important differences. It is the end of an age without money. Ancient Greeks described value in equivalencies to cattle, a common source of trade and sacrificial offerings. About 200 years after Homer’s time (600 B.C.E), the first coins appeared in ancient Greece. As Tim Brinkof explains, ‘Although the Greeks might not have been the first civilization in history to carry around coins, they were among the first to use those coins as “money” in the modern sense of the word: a medium of exchange that’s durable, portable and uniformly accepted.’ That shared recognition of value allowed people to use money to create relationships and community across wide distances. 

Assignment: Compare money to the act of bartering. How does money change people’s relationships in positive and negative ways?  In his lifetime, Greek philosopher Aristotle opined that money was a “mere sham” because it is “within our power to alter and to make it useless,” and yet, he said, money was a tool that could help us organize a society towards the goal of justice and harmony. What do you think? Cite examples from contemporary life to make your point in an “advertisement” video for money or written piece. 


ART

A Journey in Mediums The visual arts make space for communication without words. An artist’s choice of medium or color, size or focus tells a story of place or person or even more intangible elements like emotions or ideas. The author of The Odyssey was limited to words, but made many attempts at conveying ideas beyond just words, leaning into the visual arts for metaphors and imagery to develop character: “grey-eyed Athena” the most famous of these.

Assignment: Create a study of character using any elements of artistry to convey the characters of The Odyssey - human, monster, and god. Make sure you choose 1-2 elements to keep consistent, whether it’s composition or size or another element, then reveal the nature of each character through the differences, like medium or color or perspective...
 

SCIENCE

No Bones about It What if the mythical monsters in The Odyssey were actually based in fact? What if they were the results of early people trying to make sense of fossils and skeletons of creatures that didn’t exist in their modern world? You may want to have students read all or part of Greek Myths: Not Necessarily Mythical to build background information about how the Greeks may have interpreted the fossils they found as evidence of mythical creatures.

Assignment: Choose a mythical creature or natural phenomenon or supernatural event from The Odyssey and, researching modern scientific ideas, hypothesize how the mythical could actually be real. Share what you’ve learned with classmates in a slideshow – comparing details from The Odyssey to modern science.