Great Books #5: The Odyssey

The Odyssey is a sequel to the Iliad and centers on a family shattered by the Trojan War, exploring how trauma, depression, and cognitive dissonance affect each member, and how love and reunion can heal a broken soul.

• Homer’s central concern is the human condition: what it means to live in a world of war, trauma, and tragedy, and how people overcome adversity.
• The three main characters are Odysseus, his wife Penelope, and their son Telemachus, all of whom are traumatized and heartbroken in different ways.
  • Odysseus suffers from PTSD after ten years of war and ten years lost at sea; his soul is shattered by the violence and senseless death he has witnessed and caused.
  • Penelope suffers from depression because her husband has been gone for twenty years with no word of whether he is alive or dead; she cannot accept his death but also cannot justify hope, leaving her paralyzed by cognitive dissonance, shutting herself away in her room.
  • Telemachus is angry and depressed, living in the shadow of a legendary father he never knew; he cannot inherit his father’s legacy or become master of his own house while Penelope remains and the suitors consume the family’s wealth.

The ancients understood the soul as a complex, multidimensional entity shaped by family, culture, history, and the gods, and closely tied to what modern psychology calls a “worldview”—one’s understanding of who they are, where they came from, and their place in the universe.

• A worldview enables planning, empathy, and judgment; trauma splinters it, causing a rupture in identity that leads to depression—the inability to act, think clearly, feel pleasure, or trust oneself.
• In the Odyssey, all three characters have splintered souls, and the poem is fundamentally about their individual journeys to repair those souls through love for one another.

The story begins in medias res: Odysseus has been away for twenty years and is trapped on the island of the nymph Calypso, Penelope is depressed and besieged by suitors, and Telemachus is stuck and powerless.

• Athena intervenes, telling Telemachus to go find his father, launching the first books of the poem as Telemachus’s journey.
• Odysseus is eventually freed by the gods’ command and begins his voyage home, but when he is recognized at a banquet and a bard sings of the Trojan War, he weeps uncontrollably—revealing deep trauma and self-reproach.

Odysseus’s backstory reveals a man torn between love for his family and the pull of glory, forced to go to Troy despite desperately wanting to stay with his infant son and wife.

• When the Greeks come to recruit him, he feigns madness by dressing as a beggar and sowing his fields with salt, but the Greeks test him by placing his baby son Telemachus in front of his plow; he swerves to avoid the child, revealing his sanity and forcing him to join the war.
  • This episode reveals the complexity of his psychology: he loves his family but also cannot bear to be seen as a coward who stayed home while heroes like Achilles and Agamemnon went to the greatest war in history.
  • His strategy is clever but designed to be seen through, allowing him to go to war without bearing full responsibility for abandoning his family.

To justify his absence, Odysseus constructs a worldview with three reasons for fighting: justice (avenging the theft of Helen), family (returning Helen to her loved ones), and legacy (building a heroic reputation for Telemachus to inherit).

• After winning the war through the stratagem of the Trojan horse, he discovers all three justifications were false:
  • The war was not about justice but about revenge and murder.
  • It destroyed families rather than saving them—Greek soldiers killed Trojan husbands and enslaved Trojan women and children.
  • The legacy is hollow because Helen did not even want to return to Sparta, and the Trojan civilization was destroyed for no good reason.
• This shatters his worldview and causes the PTSD that defines him in the Odyssey.

The emotional climax of the episode comes when Odysseus, at a banquet, asks the bard to sing the story of the Trojan horse—the very memory he has been repressing.

• As the bard sings, Odysseus weeps like a woman weeping over her dead husband, and the comparison is deliberate: he identifies with the Trojan women whose families he destroyed.
• The specific traumatic moment is when, during the sack of Troy, he kills a soldier and watches the man’s wife cry out in grief, only for Greek soldiers to drag her away into slavery; in that moment he sees Penelope and recognizes that he has become the destroyer of families like his own.
• This recognition—that he caused the suffering of thousands of women and children, that his war was neither just nor family-preserving, that his legacy is built on atrocity—is what splits his soul and drives him to despair.
• The central question of the Odyssey becomes: having done so much evil, how can Odysseus repair himself, mend his soul, and return home to his family?