5 Reasons Adults Should Read The Odyssey
(Now, before the Christopher Nolan film comes out!)
by Ellen Finnigan
Online Courses for Adults at Teach to the Text
Missed the live class? We have an independent text study called “Let’s Read The Odyssey!” for ages 14 and up!
You should always read the book before you see the movie, obviously! I am excited to be offering an online course on The Odyssey for adults, which will wrap up before Christopher Nolan’s new film comes out this summer. Here are five reasons why you should read The Odyssey before you see the film.
1. It’s a great story.
Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey around 850 B.C. The Iliad takes place during the Trojan war, and The Odyssey takes place in the ten years after the war. It has never seemed insignificant to me that our earliest stories were written about war.
Odysseus was a king, a Greek, who fought for ten long years. On his way home, he gets waylaid, shipwrecked, abducted, and almost eaten; but he perseveres. There is no peace to be found at home: Trouble awaits; only he can set things right; and time is running out!
2. Homer is the cornerstone of a classical education.
The Silent Generation was probably the last American generation to receive a classical education, which meant children grew up reading all the Great Books that all the Great Men before them had read: Ron Paul probably read a lot of the same books that Henry David Thoreau read, who read the same books that George Washington read, who read the same books that Shakespeare and Dante and even Virgil read. Don’t get me started on what has happened to American education since then! But the thing is: Even if you didn’t receive this kind of education, it’s never too late!
A classically educated person reads primary sources, from start to finish. Familiarity with Homer was once thought to be the mark of an educated man. In fact, in one of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates is talking to Ion, a rhapsode (a traveling singer who would recite Homer’s works). Ion, who has just returned from winning first place in a rhapsode competition, thinks he knows everything.
Ion’s logic: I know Homer. Homer contains everything. Therefore I know everything.
Socrates helps to clear up his confusion of course, but one does feel after reading Homer that one has integrated something mystical into his soul, like a compendium of human life.
Gen Z streamers talk a big game about saving Western civilization, but that is impossible to do if you haven’t read the Great Books. The way we save Western civilization is not through polemics and podcasts, politics and power plays, but primarily by preserving our stories and passing them down to our children and grandchildren. Don’t you want to do your part?
3. To know the story of The Odyssey is not necessarily to know Homer.
The story of The Odyssey has been told a million times by different people. If you remember reading The Odyssey in school, chances are you read a prose version that was loosely based on the poem or a simplified version for kids. The Odyssey has all the stuff that children love (adventure, humor, cool monsters), but it also asks profound questions about war, and much of the profundity lies in its poeticism.
You simply must read the poem!
Don’t let the word “poem” scare you: A narrative poem that has been translated into English, it reads like a story; but with a good translation (we read Lattimore’s in my class), the poetic quality of the language is retained, along with the depth.
Poetry is a branch of knowledge. If you go to the Stanza della segnatura in the Palace of the Vatican in Rome, you can look up and see four frescos that Raphael painted representing the four branches of knowledge: philosophy, theology, law, and poetry. If poetry is a branch of knowledge, that means there are things we can know through poetry that we can’t know, learn, or experience in any other way.
Poetry is much closer to music than it is to fiction, or stories. Just like you cannot reduce a song to its lyrics, you cannot reduce a poem to its narrative; nor can you express it in a syllogism, state it in a law, or explain it with dogma.
When was the last time you read great poetry?
Poetry elevates the soul!
As Edgar Allen Poe wrote in his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition”:
“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem…That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful…Now the object Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me), which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement or pleasurable elevation of the soul.”
4. Christopher Nolan will probably blow it.
I hate to be a pessimist. I was excited when I saw the trailer for the film that came out in December. And I’m still excited. I’ll be there on opening night! But the chances that Nolan will do Homer justice are slim to none.
Why do I say this?
Because the tagline for the film is: Defy the gods.
That’s completely inane. Not only does it fail to capture the spirit of Homer and the character of Odysseus, it opposes them. It seems to cater to the spirit of a secular age, a spirit which would have been totally foreign to the Ancient Greeks. It is Odysseus’s reliance on the gods, not his defiance of them, that allows him to succeed in his quest!
In fact, many screen adaptations get the ending all wrong, too. If you’ve ever heard that The Odyssey ends with Odysseus “slaughtering the suitors,” you’ve heard wrong. The ending of The Odyssey is, I think, the best and worst ending to a story ever written! It also foretells all of ancient Greek tragedy.
The happy ending is, in many ways, tinged. Homer identified a human problem for which there is no human solution, which is the reason we are still going to war today.
5. It has great lessons for those in the third or fourth “quarter” of life.
I started teaching The Odyssey in my early thirties. I’m now in my late forties. Certain aspects of the story have come to mean more to me now than they did then.
You’d think that a guy who had to fight a stupid war (because he took a stupid oath), who had to leave his young wife and baby at home, who had to endure the physical and emotional trauma of war, the grief, the loss, the pain, for ten years, who missed out on his son’s childhood and had to live without the love and comfort of his wife for twenty years, could catch a break.
You’d think that when he gets home, after he deals with the problems there, he’d get to “kick back” a bit, put his feet up, relax. After all, people back then didn’t live very long, and Odysseus has to be in his forties, at least, by the time he gets home. Surely he deserves some downtime!
But no: On his way home, he is told he must go to the underworld first, where he receives this message from a blind prophet: “…after you have killed the suitors in your palace…then you must take up your well-shaped oar and go on a journey until you come where there are men living who know nothing of the sea, and who eat food that is not mixed with salt, who never have known ships, whose cheeks are painted purple…”
Say what?! He’s going to have to leave again after he gets home and go on another journey and encounter strange, possibly dangerous, purple-cheeked people?
Then the prophet says:
“Death will come to you at sea, in an altogether unwarlike way.”
Oh no! This would be terrible news for Odysseus. There would be no glory in that! Glory is the warrior’s reward, his compensation, his due.
It reminds me of a man I know who is in his early seventies and still working, because he has been raising his two grandsons, because the parents were unfit to care for them.
It reminds me of “it’s not over ‘till the fat lady sings!”
It reminds me of the words of Jesus in Luke 17:
“Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here immediately and take your place at table’? Would he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare something for me to eat. Put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink. You may eat and drink when I am finished’? Is he grateful to that servant because he did what was commanded? So should it be with you. When you have done all you have been commanded, say, ‘We are unprofitable servants; we have done what we were obliged to do.’”
Surely, we all look forward to a day when we can kick back and enjoy the fruits of our labors, when our peace will not be disturbed, when we can simply enjoy the good things in life. But sometimes life is long and short on comfort; and sometimes God gives us new missions at a very late hour.
That’s the kind of man Odysseus is: one who considers himself an unprofitable servant, a warrior who continues to heed the call of duty long after the war is over. We Americans can learn a lot from him!
And ladies, at the heart of The Odyssey is a great love story!
Would you wait twenty years for your husband to return from war, even if you had no idea if he even survived?
Penelope does. Love abides!
Homer’s “wine-blue sea”