Odysseus

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Odysseus — Ulysses to the Romans — is the central figure of Homer’s Odyssey, the king of Ithaca whose ten-year struggle to return home from the Trojan War gives the poem its shape. Cunning rather than mighty, he is the hero defined by endurance and craft: the man “of many turns,” who survives the Cyclops, the enchantress Circe, the Sirens, and the wrath of the sea-god Poseidon, and reaches his own shore at last to reclaim wife, son, and kingdom. The Greeks called the return itself a nostos; the longing it names gave later languages the word nostalgia.

As literature the Odyssey is old — it took something near its present form by the late eighth or early seventh century BCE — and Odysseus was already a fixed character of Greek myth long before anyone read him as anything but a man. The allegorical turn came later. From at least the Stoics onward, philosophical readers treated Homer as a coded teacher, and the wanderer’s voyage became an image of something inward: the trials a person passes through on the way to wisdom, the temptations that would keep the traveler from home.

In the Platonic schools of late antiquity that reading deepened into doctrine. The Neoplatonists held that the soul has fallen from its true homeland into the world of body and sense, and must labor back toward the source from which it came; Odysseus, beached far from Ithaca and bent on return, was their natural emblem for that ascent. Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus, built an entire short treatise on a few lines of the poem — the cave of the nymphs on Ithaca, read as the cosmos itself, with its two gates by which souls descend into birth and climb back out. The hero’s homecoming, on this account, is the soul’s: Ithaca is not a place on a map but the condition the soul left and is trying to recover. The reading was not Porphyry’s invention alone — the Platonist Numenius had taken the Phaeacian episode the same way before him — but it is in Porphyry that it survives whole.

It is worth keeping the registers apart. That Homer composed a poem about a king of Ithaca is a matter of literary history; that the poem is about the soul’s return is an interpretation, and a late one, imposed on a text that shows no sign of meaning it. What the Neoplatonists did was not to decode Homer but to read their own metaphysics into him — and the reading was powerful enough that, for centuries, much of the educated world could no longer hear the Odyssey without it. The wanderer became a way of talking about the longing for a home one is no longer sure one has ever seen.

→ In the library: Porphyry — On the Cave of the Nymphs (Taylor, 1823) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna): The Soul's Descent into Body

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Nous · The One · Emanation · Hestia