And so the Odyssey speaks urgently to our times. The necessary process of recognition and reintegration is accomplished, but only violently, painfully. He is at first unrecognisable to his wife (he has come back 'a different person' – literally, in that he has disguised himself and assumed a false name, but military spouses will understand the metaphor of the warrior utterly changed by war). The essence of the story is that of a veteran combatant who, after a long absence, must find his way back into a household he finds threatened by outside forces and dangerously altered. He is the original unlikely survivor, the man who always struggles free of the car crash and walks clear of the wreckage as the flames curl out: the latest iteration of the type, which runs through storytelling from archaic Greece to Hollywood, is Sandra Bullock's character in Alfonso Cuarón's blockbuster, Gravity.īut, as Aristotle put it in the Poetics, these are 'episodes'. He drags his crew bodily away from the island where the inhabitants gorge themselves on the memory-wiping, pleasure-giving lotus he withstands the ruinous song of the Sirens, who long to lure him to his death, by having himself lashed to the mast by his crew, whose ears he has stopped with wax he outwits the glamorous enchantress Circe, who turns his men into pigs he steers his ship between the maneating, many–headed Scylla and the deadly whirlpool Charybdis.

The Odyssey is a poem that we tend to remember as the hero's colourful, salt-caked adventures on the high seas: his encounters with witches, nymphs and cyclopes, his journey to the land of the dead, his shrewd and quick-tongued and fast-witted outsmarting of the terrors in his path as he strives for a decade to reach his home after the sack of Troy.

Odysseus the odyssey