I was listening to a podcast recently recounting Homer’s Odyssey. The host, Doug Metzer, did a masterful job walking through the events captured in the saga and putting the story in the context of the history and other writings of the period. He emphasized that the Odyssey is not a simple tale of valor, but also a commentary on the dubious nature of heroism. That is what makes it a modern story.
The Odyssey is in many ways the prototypical hero’s journey. Odysseus, the archetypal alpha male, sails off to war and finds glory as the architect of the fall of Troy. He then spends nine years trying to make his way back home, overcoming obstacle after obstacle along the way. He defeats the Cyclops, resists the temptation of the Sirens, and is the lone survivor when his ship is wrecked.
Eventually Odysseus makes it back to his home in Ithaca only to find a gaggle of suitors who, assuming he is dead, seek the hand of his wife, Penelope, along with his wealth. He massacres the suitors, is reunited with his wife, and takes his rightful place as King of Ithaca.
Most retellings of the story end there with a family reunited and a hero basking in his glory. However, Homer’s saga does not conclude in such a sanguine manner. It is this oft forgotten ending that provides ready guidance as we consider the plethora of hero stories we are confronted with daily, whether it’s in various media, or in the myth’s politicians weave around themselves.
After Odysseus dispatches the 108 suitors, along with an undisclosed number of maidservants deemed disloyal and a goatherd that had dissed him when he was in disguise, he finds himself confronted by the families of the suitors. They want to know how he can justify the harshness of his actions. After all, he had been gone for 20 years, and had not been heard from for the last nine. Maybe the suitors had been overly aggressive in their pursuit of Penelope, but did that justify wholesale slaughter?
The families are also troubled by the fact that Odysseus has returned alone. Twenty years before he led a generation of Ithacan youths to a dreadful war on a foreign shore and not one of them came back with him. How was that possible? Reminiscent of Job questioning God, the families’ confrontation of Odysseus makes us wonder whether he really is the hero we have made him out to be.
Like Job, the families get no real answer. As they are about to attack Odysseus (probably a bad idea), Athena intervenes. She commands the Ithacans to lay down their weapons and, channeling Rodney King, basically says “Can’t we all just get along?”. Since she is a God, they comply, and all is seemingly well.
This coda is discomforting. We all revere heroes. We do not tire of stories where great men or women face seemingly unbeatable odds, but power on through using grit and fortitude. We like them even better if their foe is pure evil, or they are exacting a well-earned revenge on those that have done them or society wrong.
But Homer does not allow us to bask in hero worship. He makes us face the consequences of the hero’s action. The lives lost. The families sundered. The community ripped apart. The hero may embody personal glory, but he also leaves a wave of destruction in his wake.
In many ways, the turbulent 1960’s and 70’s undermined the comfortable narrative of the glorious hero. The anti-hero became the focus. In films like “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Dirty Harry” the “hero” is morally suspect. We root for them with the full knowledge that they are not anyone we would ever want to emulate or have as part of our world.
In “real life”, the release of the Pentagon Papers, followed by the exposure of the FBI’s ConintelPro, Watergate and Church Committee revelations on the activities of the CIA destroyed, seemingly forever, our faith in those running the government. They were not heroes, but the morally ambiguous, and had to be watched at every turn.
And yet it is hard to shake our love of heroism. We want to put our icons onto a pedestal and boil down narratives such that the differences between good and bad are clear. We want to stand confident as to which side our champion is on. Woe to those that muddy those waters by raising inconvenient facts. History is to make us feel good about who we are by glorifying the giants that came before, regardless of troubling details.
We also see our ties to heroism in the expectations we place on our political leaders. We demand of them perfection. They must be right on every issue, never waver, never err. We dismiss their foibles as immaterial if they do not comply with our manufactured vision. Just as importantly, their opponents are not just wrong, they are inherently and irredeemably evil.
The ending of the Odyssey demands more of us. It requires that we look at those harmed by policies we support. It compels us to admit that those left behind have a right to feel frustrated and angry. It makes us take a step back and consider the consequences of actions. We are obligated to question whether the white hat we embrace is really as white as we believe it to be, and whether the hat our opponent wears isn’t more gray than black.
This is especially hard in these times. There are so many leaders who seem to care about nothing but naked power. They are willing to sacrifice values supposedly held dear to acquire that power. They create and inspire myths that mask their flaws and demonize their opponents. Frustratingly, many are willing to accept these myths as fact, looking no further than the façade.
We have an obligation to expose those myths. To strip naked the “heroes” and show the cruel reality behind their “deeds”. At the same time, we cannot make myths of our own, putting our champions on a competing plinth. Raising our beliefs to the status of unimpeachable doctrine. To do that is to perpetuate the illusion of the hero, and fail to confront the complicated reality of the world we live in.
The saga of Odysseus does not conclude with the end of the Odyssey, book 7 of an 8-book cycle called the Telegony, of which only the Odyssey and Iliad survive. While we do not have Book 8, we know from other writings that Odysseus quickly grows tired of the staid life, and soon leaves Ithaca and Penelope behind. He gets involved in another war and marries another queen. He eventually makes his way back to a war-torn Ithaca, only to be killed by a son he sired while on the 9-year trek back from Troy. Not what most of us think of as the quintessential end of the hero’s journey, but maybe fitting. Maybe the “hero” is not all he or she is cracked up to be. Another apt lesson from Homer.
Wise and sage