The Odyssey completes the story of the Iliad not just in time but thematically as well. It picks up where the Iliad left off, but it also deals directly with some of the effects of the war and so requires a new kind of hero, Odysseus, “the man of many ways,” to deal with them.  

       The plot that gives meaning to this theme is straightforward. Twenty years before the Odyssey opens, the Achaians (Greeks) left for Troy to avenge the betrayal of Menelaos by the Trojan prince, Paris. The war took ten years (the story of the Iliad), and after the Achaians sacked Troy, they set off for home. Just before landing, Odysseus and his men are thrown off course and forced to undergo a series of life-threatening adventures. During their wanderings, Odysseus encounters a great variety of peoples that present him with their own special trials and temptations, many of them feminine. For 9 of the 9½ years of his wanderings, Odysseus is under the influence of two archetypal feminine figures, Circe and Kalypso. The crucial question of the story is: what does Odysseus learn from his wanderings that makes it possible to restore order at home and be reunited with his wife after twenty years? Their reunion is so extraordinary that after Odysseus defeats the suitors and he and Penelope retire to their bedroom to make love, Athene responds by stopping time. For a brief moment, husband and wife are allowed to escape the violence of the epic action and experience a timeless joy that none of the other characters has known.  

       Two issues of the work are key. The first is the topsy-turvy world produced by the war. The men returning from battle have to deal with scars and the painful memories of lost comrades-in-arms; they also have to deal with the baleful effects of the war at home. All the sons have grown up without fathers; and the suitors of Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, have had no king around to keep them in line. The absence of masculine rule is everywhere evident. The second issue is the vital role of marriages in the continuity of a civilization. The plot of the Iliad reveals an intrinsic dignity to man in the face of those forces within himself that can threaten his very existence when he succumbs to them. The Odyssey celebrates the love between a husband and wife and the joy they can know if, if, the two endure and grow. The principle concern of the Iliad is the emergence of a new kind of honor that serves as a curb on the male use of power. The Odyssey isn’t less concerned with abuses of power, both male and female, but it treats those abuses now in the context of marriages. The work basically affirms an anti-romantic view of life, one grounded in suffering: a man and woman can have a good marriage if they learn from their experiences; if they make a place for learning and the suffering that so often goes with it.   

A Note on the “many cities” Odysseus visits  

       In the Odyssey, Odysseus has to learn the nature of regimes because people are a product of the regimes in which they’re raised. That learning is essential to his homecoming. There are three levels of regimes in the epic: 1) Those that are visible to our senses in time, Ithaka, Pylos, and Sparta; 2) those archetypal regimes that can be grasped by our minds—the two prototypes of all regimes are the Phaiakians and the Cyclopes, both of which grew up side by side until the Cyclopes became too violent and the Phaiakians moved away. The Biblical and poetic accounts are far more accurate on this matter than the scientific. There is no progress or evolution (read G.K. Chesterton’s wonderful work, The Everlasting Man): the idealized and the barbaric along with the good and evil that underlie them both have been with us since the Fall, since Cain’s murder of Abel and his son’s, Enoch’s, building of the first city. And 3) all the other cities that represent some twisted combination or product of these two.  

       If we look at the cities in terms of the poetry they generate, we can say, as I mention above, that the Odyssey affirms a basically anti-romantic view of life. We can describe each regime in terms of a different kind of poetry, a distinct kind of pathos focused on the male. Pylos and Sparta are too caught in the past: the poetry of Pylos represents the pathos of the flawed heroic, the inflated male ego (men killing each other in a spirit of pride, for the booty they can acquire: Nestor never stops talking about his exploits; his wife is virtually non-existent); Sparta represents the pathos of its opposite, the soap-opera pathos of a husband enabling a wife trapped in her emotions, in self-pity and guilt, and who uses drugs to escape the past. Ithaka suffers from similar conditions; but it’s awaiting the change that both Odysseus and his son will bring to it after their reunion.