Cody Marby

Post-traumatic stress in Homer’s Odyssey

Is it possible to return home from war? Is the concept of home unalterable to he who has been altered by trauma? Odysseus, arguably the most famous veteran in literary history, searches the far corners of the Mediterranean for answers to these painful questions in Homer’s famous epic about homecoming, Odyssey.

Current archaeological evidence indicates that war, piracy, conflict, and regional violence were pivotal parts of life in Late Bronze and Early Iron Age Greece. Literary evidence, too, suggests this in the form of Homer’s Iliad. One of only two surviving works from the Ancient Greek “Epic Cycle”, this text was foundational to Greek identity. It was performed religiously in ancient festivals across the Aegean, including the Athenian Panathenaea, and was so treasured and revered that it was most likely converted from oral tradition to a handwritten work of literature in the dusk of the Greek Dark Ages. Though pain, suffering, glory, and death are explored in great detail in the Iliad, it leaves what happens next undefined: when and where does war come to an end?

Serving both as a mirror to the Iliad and as an immortal answer to its unanswered questions of mortality, nostos, the Greek concept of a warrior’s homecoming, defines the Odyssey. The story begins in medias res on the island of Ithaca with the wife and son of King Odysseus, giving the audience a social foundation and literal destination for Odysseus’s journey: Queen Penelope fends off an army of suitors besieging the palace for her hand in marriage, while Prince Telemachus grapples with his identity by navigating the boundary between innocence and adulthood; meanwhile, Odysseus is held captive by the nymph Calypso far away on the island of Ogygia, spending every day weeping on the shoreline and thinking of home. This latter detail creates a metaphor that Homer illustrates throughout the entirety of the work—namely, Odysseus is both literally and mentally trapped, incapable of returning home.

Telemachus’s brief travels to the mainland to search for news of his father establishes early in the work that nostos exists as a spectrum and not a single, definitive phenomenon. He learns of Menelaus’s adventures in Egypt, Agamemnon’s tragic death, and sees Nestor living happily among his beloved family. Even his own homecoming, though hardly an epic journey, is one of twists and turns as he travels widely and narrowly avoids an assasination attempt. Homecoming, then, Homer argues, is different for every person who experiences it.

Penelope is being courted by over one hundred princely young men—a process she once enjoyed at the hands of one man, Odysseus. The presence of these suitors, though unwelcome and overwhelming, surely gives Penelope nostalgic visions of her young husband before he sailed for Troy nearly twenty years prior. Is her husband already here? Was he just a dream? Would she even recognize him? Penelope spends the majority of the tale skeptical and suspicious. She remains wary of any man who claims to be or to have knowledge of her husband, employs delay tactics, and keeps her physical and emotional distance from all but her son and most loyal servants. Even when she and the disguised Odysseus exchange cryptic messages by the fire—even when Odysseus has killed every last suitor and stands before her in all his heroic glory—even then she cannot believe he has actually returned. Perhaps this is because the Odysseus she knew can never, and will never, come home.

Perhaps, also, this is because the scene he ultimately returns to at home is nearly identical to the scene he faced in Troy: an army of men from various regions are laying siege to a fortified yet vulnerable kingdom all for the sake of power, wealth, and a beautiful woman. Odysseus, through this lens, escapes Troy only to find that his homeland has transformed into the figurative Trojan plains. The situation is dire, and is only resolved once Odysseus—disguised as a beggar with a fierce and murderous warrior inside, like the literal disguise he employed at Troy according to Helen, as well as his masterpiece of cunning, the Trojan Horse—convinces the suitors to allow him behind their defences, exposing themselves to disaster.

Odysseus begins his homecoming as an epic hero, a successful king, and an admiral of a fleet of ships; however, his proud identity is concrete only in the context of war, and he is soon relegated by fate to being the captain of the last remaining ship, and then a lone shipwrecked sailor clinging desperately to the shrapnel of his own ruin. The seeds of his downfall are sewn from the very beginning, when his disobedient crew refuses to flee the area after sacking a coastal town. Their reluctance to leave spells disaster, as local reinforcements cause heavy casualties during their narrow escape. Both Odysseus, having ordered the raid so soon after finally being free from a decade of bloodshed, and his men, having refused to leave after the fighting, display perfectly how difficult the transition from war to peace can be.

In every encounter—including that with his own father after his trials have come to an end, but aside from his stay with the Phaeacians, albeit reluctantly—Odysseus is hesitant to reveal his true identity. It is as if he no longer knows the answer to the simple question of “who are you, stranger?”, and so he feels the need to fabricate origin story after origin story in hopes that one of his lies may someday feel true. From scene to scene, he is never the same Odysseus. Even the gods support his deceit, helping him shapeshift at will—appearing now kingly and muscular, then shriveled and frail. Alternatively, perhaps he carries immense guilt—for the death of his men, the murder of Hector’s infant son, and so on—and thus he cannot bear the weight of his own name. Considering (evidenced by the Phaeacean bard) the exploits of the Achaeans have long ago reached the far corners of the Mediterranean, he must also fear for his life at the hands of those who were impacted by the destruction of Troy. Can he ever feel safe again knowing he may so easily encounter such an individual? Regardless, who he is and where he has been remains an ever-changing enigma throughout the Odyssey, and this serves to further impede his ability to not only go home, but to know where his home is in the first place. Is it truly Ithaca, or is it forever Ilium? Or, as he claims in his several false narratives, Crete, Cyprus, or Sicily?

Even when the gods take pity on him and orchestrate his escape from Calypso’s clutches, Odysseus is nowhere near free from his isolation and nowhere closer to home. An omnipotent force in the shape of Poseidon—representing in this instance the inescapable and unpredictable influence of post-traumatic stress—leads to a near-death experience in rough seas, and his subsequent washing up on the shores of Scheria “swollen, brine aplenty gushing out of his mouth and nostrils” (5.503-504). Even in the peaceful Phaeacean utopia, Odysseus is neither content nor mentally stable. He begs to go home even after generous offers from King Alcinous, is moved to tears by the bard who sings of Troy, and is triggered to near violence by the harmless taunts of a competitive Phaeacean athlete.

Though in the Odyssey over nine years have elapsed since Odysseus set sail for home, his experience of nostos is evidently endless: even though he is no longer held captive on Ogygia, he can never escape the desolate island of trauma; even though he sets foot “on native ground at last” (13.286), he finds it is no longer a place that feels familiar and safe; and even when he has extinguished the existential threat to his family and therefore has no need to hide, he cannot help but cause unnecessary pain to his grieving father by lying about his identity to his face. These are but three examples of symptoms for what we today call “post-traumatic stress disorder”. Though as far as we know the ancients had no such word, the concept, and thus the experience, was as prevalent then as it is now.

The Odyssey found me at my darkest hour—alone, afraid, and in hiding. I was no longer a sailor whose efforts fueled the machine of war, and I had no idea how to handle that. Like most veterans, I enlisted very young (19 in my case)—while my brain was still developing and my identity had yet to be forged by the fires of experience—and so my concept of self was thoroughly shattered when I left the Navy five years later. Who am I, really? Where do I go? Who can I trust?

Though I didn’t know it when I first picked up the Robert Fagles translation during this period of crisis, the struggles of Odysseus would forever change the way I think and the way I see myself, my home, and the world around me. Homer’s depth of characterization spoke to me in ways that only those who have seen the horrors of war could articulate. I saw myself in the mannerisms, the guilt, the fears, the anxieties, and the wanderings of Odysseus, and I asked myself what could be learned from his journey. I saw that people nearly three millennia ago experienced the things I was experiencing, and so I learned to observe from a distance my troubles so that I may also distance myself from my pain. I saw that I knew not who I really was, and so I spent the next several years finding out. Most importantly, I saw that home is in the heart, not on the map, and so I picked myself up and began building the foundations for a life I truly love: a life steeped in the immortal waters of the great books.

All of this was thanks to the genius of Homer and the insights of Odysseus. Many works of literature I have read over the years have expanded and changed each time I revisited them, but only the Odyssey has expanded and changed who I am as a human being to such an immeasurable degree. It showed me that I was neither broken nor alone, but instead in the midst of my own personal nostos, and thus it empowered me to come home at last after a long and arduous voyage at sea. And for that I will be forever grateful.