The Raider And His Home: Odysseus, His Odyssey, And The Halls of Ithaca:

The Warrior's Life: Inherent Tensions:

While the Iliad examines the tensions inherent to the individual's relationship with war and heroism -- most notably between the relationship of Agamemnon and Achilles, or Achilles and the war itself -- the Odyssey examines similar tensions inherent to the individual's relationship to war and the home, how the experience of war turns man into a warrior, and how difficult it is to reconcile this role with the needs of the home.

The details of Odysseus' life and experience as a warrior and king will no doubt strike us all as exotic and ancient and foreign, but within this story we can still find themes that resonate with our own culture and, often, our own, personal experiences.

Some of the key tensions this story examines:

The glories of war vs. the threat to domestic security. Who protects the home front when the warriors are far from home?

The carnal pleasures of the Mycanaean-Ancient Greek male vs. the domestic chastity of the lonely wife. What is the relationship between gratified desire and jealousy?

The dogs of war finally returning to their place on the porch of peace. How can a man trained to murder return live peaceable at home?

And finally, and at root most importantly: The necessities and limits of hospitality;  the raider’s dependence on and willingness to transgress the property of strangers -- and to transgress these laws in his own home. At what point must we violate our society's most sacred moral codes in order to maintain the security of that society?

What Makes Literature Literature, and What Makes Greek Literature Great Literature:

Great art explores the nature of the human experience and connects the specific -- in this case a Bronze Age Greek king named Odysseus -- with the universal: the life of any soldier, of any military family awaiting the return of their husband or father (or, today, mother) in any time or place, or the life of each of us.

What we inherit from the Greeks, especially in relationship to the literary arts (which includes not only poetry but theater and then film), is this willingness to explore the tensions inherent to human nature and human relationships without assuming preconceived conclusions. That is, we inherit from the Greeks, is literature  as exploration, where the reader, not the author, must reach his or her own conclusions concerning the morality or justice of the outcome.

Thus the Greeks give us the tradition of literature as critical thinking, breaking the arts free from the constraints inherent to religious art.  From the Greeks we learn the reader must play god and pass his or her own judgment upon the characters.

And so that is what we must do with wily, cunning, lying, cheating, raiding, murdering Odysseus, perhaps the most important, completely human Greek hero.

See Ithaca