Homer’s Odyssey/and the quest for ‘normal’ at the end of the world
In case you haven’t noticed, the /Odyssey/ has been rather prominent in the zeitgeist lately. From TikTok musicals to Hollywood blockbusters, this nearly-three-thousand-year old epic has gripped the imagination of the twenty-first century. What about this story makes it so irresistible?
Maybe it’s because the /Odyssey/ is about the end of the world. The text presents us with a vision of social collapse: norms that uphold civilization are made meaningless in the faraway lands our hero drifts through. Back home, the stability of his kingdom hangs on only by a few threads. Monsters roam the land as the old world dies and the new remains unborn. The wider mythography tells a similar tale: the fall of Troy marks the twilight of the Heroic Age and the retreat of the gods from the affairs of mortals. History unveils a ghost haunting the poem’s pages: the cultural memory of the Bronze Age Collapse, the apocalypse that destroyed the Mycenaean civilization from which Greek myth originates.
No wonder the poem resonates with us today. Between pandemics, climate disasters, recessions, and the rise of fascism, we, too, have spent recent years sailing from crisis to crisis in the treacherous seas of an increasingly dystopian world. We, too, are desperate for a way back home.
Read this way, the /Odyssey/ seems to be a hopeful tale of perseverance amidst crisis. After all, despite twenty years of suffering, our hero’s struggle is not in vain. Odysseus reaches Ithaca, reunites with Penelope, and defeats the men threatening his family. He makes it back to normal. It’s the ending we’d wish for ourselves. Indeed, it’s /this/ story that adaptations give us: one man’s quest to return to his family.
But the epic holds so much more: Odysseus’ personal story is inseparable from the politics of his world. His return to normal is synonymous with restoring the status quo. His reunion with Penelope is /also/ how he regains his throne, and his quest to go back home is also a quest to restore control over his household. And doing so requires more than the slaughter of the suitors. For his house to return to order, the halls must be cleansed of all stains—literal and metaphorical.
Twelve enslaved girls, themselves victims of the suitors’ lust, are thus brought forward. They are forced to clean up their corpses, wipe their blood off the furniture, take out the trash. Once they are done, every one of them is hanged.
/That/ is Ithaca’s return to normal: dangling from a noose for all to see.
Three-thousand years onward, is our own state of ‘normal’ really any better? The pandemic is over only on paper. People continue to become infected, acquire disabilities, lose their lives; the world has simply stopped pretending to care. The climate crisis similarly rages unabated, its devastation deemed an acceptable price for ‘business as usual.’ Even now, normality remains a noose tied around the throats of the disposable.
But unlike most adaptations, Homer’s Odyssey does not actually end when Odysseus reclaims the throne, or when he reunites with Penelope, or when the slave girls are hanged. The story continues: the families of the slain suitors demand retribution, igniting a civil war halted only by Athena’s intervention. It is /here/ that the epic ends.
Though Homer does not tell us what happens next, we know Odysseus’ journey is far from over. He must leave Ithaca for one last quest: to carry an oar inland until he encounters someone who mistakes it for a winnowing fan, for only by completing this impossible task can he appease Poseidon. In some later mythic traditions, he’s exiled for slaying the suitors; in others, he is killed. The details vary but the pattern does not. Odysseus arrives home, but he does not get to remain.
It’s a cruel end. Not only because our protagonist might deserve better, but also because of all the lives his homecoming has cost: the crewmembers who never made it back to Ithaca; the young men slaughtered in his hall; the enslaved girls hanged in the courtyard; the countless innocents murdered at Troy. All this bloodshed ultimately proves meaningless.
Perhaps, the epic wishes to say that the world Odysseus knew was marked for death the moment he sailed for Troy, and no amount of violence now can stay the course. Our heroes can pretend for a while, but the world is ending all the same, and its burial shroud can be woven and unwoven only so many times.
One shudders to think whether our world, too, may be past such point of no return.
Yet the world has ended before. Through warfare and genocide, through famine and plague and flood, through chain reactions of violence set off by empires convinced of their own permanence, the world has ended a thousand times over. Yet it still keeps turning. People keep living.
Barbarity does not follow collapse: time and again, people respond to disaster with solidarity and collective care. They come together. They innovate, rebuild, tell stories, sing songs—even in the dark times. The Odyssey is proof: it may preserve memories of Bronze Age civilizations, but the tale itself arose from the songs of countless poets in the ‘Dark Ages’ that followed. A thousand civilizations have collapsed, but a thousand worlds have flourished in the spaces between.
Which brings us here—at the precipice, perhaps, of another world’s end. What has been lost cannot be restored, and much of the sorrow yet to come may no longer be preventable. Limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees may now be impossible and the long-term public health consequences of the pandemic must be reckoned with. The institutions meant to protect us are abandoning us one by one—retreating, like Olympians of myth, from the affairs of mortals. No divine intervention will hold our world in stasis; Athena will not help restore it back to normal.
All we are left with is each other. Perhaps that is enough.