Step One: The Beginning of the Poem and the Beginning of Odysseus’s song
To a casual reader, the Odyssey is a story about a war-hero’s tumultuous return home. It is the tale of the nostos—homecoming—a term present in English in the compound nostalgia (lit. “grief for a homecoming”) In exploring the tensions between a man at war and at home, the epic explores the transition from one sphere to another and the transformations that accrue to the identities of the absent hero and his family. In this exploration, the epic is also about what it means to be a person, the constituent parts of our identities, and the attendant values that must be embraced not just to survive but to thrive. At the same time, the epic is also a journey. As a metaphor, this is the journey of any person through life; as a literal journey, it also helps to plot Greek culture against a background of ‘others’: monsters, gods, barbarians, etc. The epic is constantly drawing boundaries between one world and another and establishing normative assumptions about human behavior.
Less well noted but of no minor importance to these other themes is the Odyssey’s exploration of politics and leadership. Indeed, from the beginning of the epic the narrator asks us to consider the relationship of Odysseus as the leader who tried really hard to bring his men home, but failed. So, in part, the epic details the efforts of a leader who loses his people (and appears to blame them). The theme of leadership appears in Ithaca as well where the absence of the leader has created a vacuum of power. Without Odysseus, Telemachus does not know how to be a man; but the Ithacans have suffered for lack of judge, guidance, and order during his absence.
Where the Iliad portrays multiple men with access to power jockeying for position and negotiating order and predetermined notions of leadership as a coalition, the Odyssey returns to some of the same questions from the perspective of one leader and one polity. General questions to ask include: To what extent to the assumptions and questions about leadership posed by the Iliad apply to the Odyssey? How does Odysseus’ epic depict mutual responsibilities of the leader and led? What kind of a government does this epic seem to depict? Are its elements sufficient to the challenges its people meet?
Odyssey Book 1 (1-90); Book 2; Book 9 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136
Optional: E. Cook. “Active and Passive Heroics.”