Odysseus

← Encyclopedia

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.

The man of many turns

The poem’s first word fixes its subject: andra, “the man” — and the man is qualified at once as polytropos, the one of many turns, many ways, many devices. The epithet carries a double sense the Greek refused to choose between. It is the wanderer turned this way and that by the world, blown off course for ten years between fallen Troy and his island; and it is the strategist whose mind has many turnings, who lies as readily as he fights and survives by the quality the Greeks called metis — cunning intelligence, the practical wit that reads a situation and bends it. Where Achilles is force and rage, Odysseus is craft and patience. He is the one who thought of the wooden horse that took the city ten years of fighting could not; the one who, trapped in the Cyclops’ cave, tells the giant his name is Nobody, so that when the blinded Polyphemus roars to his neighbors that Nobody is killing him, they shrug and leave him to it. The same cunning is also his flaw: having escaped, he cannot resist shouting his true name back across the water, and the boast hands Polyphemus the means to curse him — for the Cyclops is the son of Poseidon, and it is the sea-god’s anger, fed by that taunt, that keeps Odysseus from home.

The shape of the wandering is famous enough to have become a map of how the soul can be lost. After the Cyclops come the Laestrygonians and the Lotus-eaters, whose flower makes the men who taste it forget the way home; the floating island of Aeolus, keeper of the winds, whose gift of a bag of storms is opened by the crew within sight of Ithaca and blows them all the way back; the year on Circe’s island, where the enchantress turns men into swine and Odysseus, protected by a drug, becomes instead her lover. From Circe he is sent to the edge of the world to consult the dead — the nekyia, the descent to Hades, where he speaks with the shade of the prophet Teiresias and with his own mother, and learns what waits for him. He passes the Sirens, whose song is the promise of all knowledge and would hold a man on their shore until he starved, by stopping his crew’s ears and having himself bound to the mast so that he alone can hear and live. He threads the strait between Scylla, the six-headed thing on the cliff, and Charybdis, the whirlpool that swallows the sea; he loses men to the one rather than the whole ship to the other. His crew, starving on the island of the Sun, slaughter the cattle of Helios that they had sworn to leave alone, and for that the god destroys them all. Odysseus alone survives, washed up on the island of the nymph Calypso, who keeps him seven years and offers him immortality if he will stay — and he refuses it, weeping on her shore for the smoke rising from his own land. Set free at last, wrecked again, he reaches the Phaeacians, a people half in the human world and half out of it, who hear his whole story and carry him home asleep, setting him on Ithaca’s shore with his treasure beside him. There, disguised as a beggar, he tests his household, strings the great bow that no suitor can bend, and kills the men who have spent years eating his substance and courting his wife. The reunion with Penelope, who tests him in turn before she will believe, and the recognition by his aged father Laertes, close the return.

From hero to allegory

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. The method by which this was done — reading a text for senses beneath its surface — had begun as a defense. Philosophers troubled by Homer’s gods, who lie and lust and brawl, rescued the poems by reading them otherwise; and once the gods could be powers of nature or states of the soul, the human story could be read the same way. The earliest interpreters in this line made Circe’s drug an image of pleasure that turns men beastly, and Odysseus’ resistance to it the work of reason holding the appetites in check. The wanderer became, in their hands, a walking lesson in Stoic endurance — the wise man who keeps his bearing through every reversal that fortune can throw at him, and is brought down by nothing.

The fullest surviving specimen of this older, ethical allegory is the Homeric Problems of Heraclitus, an interpreter of around the first century CE — not the philosopher of Ephesus, but a later writer who borrowed the name. His treatise, the only extended ancient defense of Homer to come down whole, sets out to clear the poet of the charge of impiety by showing that what looks like scandal is allegory throughout: Circe is the cycle of generation, the Sirens stand for the seduction of learning, and the whole voyage traces the soul’s contest with the passions. The poems, on this reading, are not stories about gods behaving badly but a single veiled instruction, and Homer the first of the sages.

The defense had a target. Plato had wanted Homer out of the ideal city, the poets banished for telling lies about the gods and feeding the unruly part of the soul; and the long allegorical tradition was, in part, the answer to that charge — the attempt to keep Homer at the center of Greek education by showing that what Plato read as lies were veils. The irony is that the case for Homer was eventually made in Plato’s own coin. The Stoics had built their method on etymology, prying a hidden physics out of the gods’ names; the Platonists raised it into a metaphysics, until Homer was read not against Plato but as his secret ally, a teacher of the same truths in story form. Odysseus, who in the Republic is among the souls choosing a quiet life after the long labor of the last one, became in the schools the very pattern of the labor — the soul that has learned what the sea costs and wants only to be home.

The voyage as the soul’s return

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. The soul, in this metaphysics, descends from the realm of Intellect through the orders of being into matter, forgets the country it came from, and spends its embodied life either sunk in that forgetting or striving to climb back. A hero blown across the sea for ten years, holding to a homeland he can barely remember and refusing even a goddess’ offer of immortality because it is not his immortality, was made for the part.

Plotinus himself, the founder of the school, gave the reading its most quoted form. In the treatise on Beauty — the sixth tractate of his first Ennead — he turns from the question of how the soul rises to the beautiful and breaks into Homer: the flight he is describing is the one Odysseus made when he tore himself from Circe and from Calypso, the man who would not stay for all the pleasures held out to his eyes. The fatherland, Plotinus says, is the place we came from, and there the Father is; and the journey is not one the feet can make. The whole of the Odyssey is folded, in that passage, into a figure for the soul’s turn inward and upward. The later Platonist Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus, built an entire short treatise on a few lines of the poem — the cave of the nymphs on Ithaca, where the Phaeacians lay the sleeping Odysseus down, 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 of Apamea and his associate Cronius had taken the cave the same way before him, fixing the two gates as the celestial signs of Cancer and Capricorn, the one the road of descent into bodies and the other the road of return — but it is in Porphyry that it survives whole.

The treatise that carries this reading was printed in English by the Platonist Thomas Taylor, who could not let the matter rest with the cave alone. To his 1823 translation of Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs he added an appendix unfolding the whole arc of the wanderings as the soul’s passage: Calypso as the imagination, the storms as the surge of the passions, Scylla as the snatch of anger on its cliff, the final homecoming as the intellect’s return to itself. He closed it by recalling Plotinus’ own words — that our true country, like that of Odysseus, is the place from which we came, and where our father lives.

Keeping the registers apart

It is worth holding two things at once. 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, laid over a text that gives 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. Yet the two readings do not cancel. Inside the Platonic frame the allegory is not a borrowed garment but the poem’s hidden sense, set there — so its readers held — by a Homer who was a theologian before he was a poet, a knower of divine things speaking in stories so that the truth would keep until minds were ready for it. Inside the historian’s frame the poem is a Bronze Age homecoming sung into shape by oral poets across generations, and the soul’s-journey reading is an episode in the long afterlife of a story that outgrew its first telling. Both frames are doing real work; neither needs the other’s permission. The figure that survives both is the same: a man at sea, a shore he cannot reach, and the conviction — call it homesickness, call it the soul’s memory of its source — that the way back exists and is worth ten years of suffering.

That afterlife did not stop with the ancient schools. The allegorized Odysseus shaped the very form of later epic; the Neoplatonist reading stands behind the allegorical poems of late antiquity and, through them, behind Dante’s pilgrim soul climbing from the dark wood toward its source. The wanderer who would not stay became, in the long Western imagination, the type of every seeker who mistrusts an easy paradise and holds out for the harder home.

The texts and the scholarship

The poem itself is the Odyssey, the second of the two great epics ascribed to Homer, fixed in something near its present form by the late eighth or early seventh century BCE and transmitted as the work of a single poet whom later antiquity made the fountainhead of Greek wisdom. The Neoplatonic reading of it can be followed in the primary texts: Plotinus’ meditation on Beauty, where Odysseus’ flight from Circe and Calypso becomes the soul’s flight to the fatherland, survives in Stephen MacKenna’s public-domain translation of The Enneads (First Ennead, Sixth Tractate), as does the doctrine of the fall that underwrites it (Fourth Ennead, Eighth Tractate). Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs — with Thomas Taylor’s appendix extending the allegory across the whole voyage — is hosted in Taylor’s 1823 version (Taylor’s translation).

The standard modern study of how the Platonists read Homer is Robert Lamberton’s Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (University of California Press, 1986), which traces the tradition from its second-century roots through Porphyry and Proclus and argues for its decisive influence on the later epic, down to Dante; its catalog page is at University of California Press. The foundational survey of ancient allegory of Homer remains Félix Buffière’s Les mythes d’Homère et la pensée grecque (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1956), a six-hundred-page Sorbonne thesis mapping the whole field from the Stoics to the Neoplatonists, including the readings of Odysseus’ encounters with Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens as the soul’s contest with the world; the publisher’s page is at Les Belles Lettres. The earlier ethical layer of the tradition can be read in the only extended ancient treatise on Homer to survive whole, the Homeric Problems of Heraclitus the Allegorist, translated by Donald A. Russell and David Konstan (Society of Biblical Literature, 2005), whose edition is described at Bryn Mawr Classical Review.

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

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Nous · The One · Emanation · Hestia · Allegorical Exegesis · Numenius Of Apamea · Soul · Plato · Stoicism