Like the myriad literary successors that have grown like branches and leaves from the great trunk of this epic poem, the Odyssey is a story about the journey through life and time, as well as through space. Homecoming is more than a physical arrival. For Odysseus, half the adventure continues after he has seen off Scylla and Charybdis, the Cyclops and Circe, the Lotus Eaters and the Cattle of the Sun. Having found himself washed up – after 10 years of trying to get there – on the shores of his beloved Ithaca, he manages to avoid the pompous mistake that got Agamemnon killed. Instead of arriving all puffed up and victorious, he disguises himself as a beggar. Undercover, he scopes out his palace, his domain, works out what he has to do to regain his kingdom and sets about it carefully, cleverly and ruthlessly. The Odyssey is an object lesson in the power of human cunning. He is, we are told in the earliest lines of the poem, the only one of his comrades who gets home alive: “The recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all.” Meantime his son, Telemachus, embarks on a journey, too: the goddess Athene sends him away from Ithaca on a voyage to visit the heroes Nestor and Menelaos, to discover news of Odysseus – Telemachus’s own Bildungsroman. It is on this journey that he learns to be the true son of his father.
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