Odysseus: Exile as a Journey and Return

Homer's Odyssey is an epic poem about Odysseus's return home (Gr. nostos) to Ithaca after a twenty year absence. Odysseus had spent ten years waging war against Troy and additional ten years in exile wandering the Mediterranean. The poem deals with themes of longing, memory, and identity--themes that will crop up again and again in our readings.

Odysseus is described by Homer as a man of cunning, who uses deception and his gift of storytelling to overcome obstacles on his journey. Exile as a subversive strategy of mimicry and cunning was picked up by Joyce in his Ulysses. In his Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Joyce writes of exile as both artistic posture and critical stance:

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning."

In the course of his travels, Odysseus also has to rely on the kindness of strangers. The strict system of rules in ancient Greece that governed hospitality is called xenia. The guest would often take a position of a suppliant, showing his need and dependent state. Xenia demanded that the host offer food and shelter to the wayfaring stranger, even before he inquired about his name and origin.  Here is a painting depicting Odysseus asking princess Nausicaa to offer him hospitality after he arrives on the shore exhausted, hungry, and naked.