The book is The Odyssey by Homer. It was originally an oral tradition story told long before it was written down. But it was most likely first composed in the 8th or 7th century BC. I read the Robert Fagles translation in the Penguin Deluxe Classics 1998 paperback edition, in the 2009 boxset edition that includes The Iliad and The Aeneid. I read it in January of 2024.
The title refers Odysseus and his troubled journey home from the Trojan war. This is considered a sequel to The Iliad as it takes place right after the Trojan war.
I read this because I want to read more classic literature. I read The Iliad last year. I plan to also read The Aeneid this year. My favorite movie is O Brother Where Art Thou? It’s a Coen brothers film that’s supposed to be a southern gothic retelling of The Odessey. Harold Bloom also considers The Odyssey to be the beginning of the western canon. So I’ve been wanting to read this book for a long time.
My main takeaway from this book is the importance of men in a home. Odysseus is away fighting the Trojans for 20 years. His son is fully grown and is desperate for his father. Nefarious suiters are hanging around Odysseus’ house eating all his food and trying to steal his wife.
His son, Telemachus longs for his father. Although he is 20 years old he is powerless to defend his father’s home. His father has been away his entire life. He was never taught how to fight or be a man.
It made me think about how crucial a father is for a boy. How much of our God-given gender manifests in us naturally? Is it so automatic?
It seems to me that there are many ways in which our gender comes to us naturally but they are not always the best aspects of our gender. Like everything else in the universe, our bodies are fallen. What ought to come naturally to us as God intended, doesn’t happen. Or it gets distorted into a toxic masculinity or toxic femininity. We need our parents to show us the right way to do things, including how we are supposed to act like men and women.
I know it’s one of the main features of an adventure story to actually leave the house. All the stories we love require the “call to adventure” where the main character leaves his home and goes out to do something great. But here Odysseus is trying to get back home. And from a total bullshit war too. They were fighting over a chick named Helen? She was not worth leaving the house.
Has the fabled “call to adventure” reshaped our mindset into thinking you have to leave your home to do anything great at all? A lot of the man-o-sphere advice in our culture today has a lot to say about making money and how to get in shape. And in the dregs of the internet you can find the Andrew Tate retards. But very little of any of it is about being a good father and husband.
I listen to Joe Rogan a lot and he has many people on like David Goggins and Cameron Hanes and they’re all about “stay hard” and “keep hammering” and all that motivational stuff, which I guess you could apply to fatherhood and being a husband. But it’s never specifically that. I don’t know.
Rogan himself, in all his talk of never giving up and pushing yourself, he hardly ever talks about it in the context of his family. He never has on anyone who talks about fatherhood and marriage.
What are all those high performance and motivational things for in the end? A man’s own personal emotional health and well-being? Sure. But I think all the temporal and practical application of being a magnanimous stud ultimately culminates in having a well-run home.
The Greek names of characters and places got a little confusing. Otherwise this book is very accessible and easy to read.
The tone was epic and dramatic. Then it got dark and violent at the end.
Odysseus might be the best hero to emulate. He’s a hero’s hero. A villain to avoid are all the douchey suiters. And we should do everything we can so that our sons don’t turn out like Telemachus.
I recommend this to all fathers. We’ve greatly disregarded the home and family in our culture in the stories we tell today, and it’s ironic to see that the story that kicked off the western literary canon is all about a great warrior and adventurer just trying to get home.
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Notable Quotables
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He could almost see his magnificent father, here …in the mind’s eye—if only he might drop from the clouds and drive these suitors all in a rout throughout the halls and regain his pride of place and rule his own domains! (p81)
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I would never have grieved so much about his death if he’d gone down with comrades off in Troy or died in the arms of loved ones, once he had wound down the long coil of war. Then all united Achaea would have raised his tomb
and he’d have won his son great fame for years to come. But now the whirlwinds have ripped him away, no fame for him! (p85)
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Few sons are the equals of their fathers; most fall short, all too few surpass them. (p102)
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But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods
can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.” (p115)
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May the gods endow them with fortune all their lives, may each hand down to his sons the riches in his house and the pride of place the realm has granted him. But as for myself, grant me a rapid convoy home to my own native land. How far away I’ve been from all my loved ones—how long I have suffered!” (p184)
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Nothing worse than the sea, I always say, to crush a man, the strongest man alive.” (p196)
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They have no meeting place for council, no laws either, no, up on the mountain peaks they live in arching caverns each a law to himself, ruling his wives and children, not a care in the world for any neighbor. (p215)
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By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive than rule down here over all the breathless dead. (p265)
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and I am Odysseus’ only son. He fathered me,
he left me behind at home, and from me he got no joy. (p342)
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Three times he made it shudder, straining to bend it, three times his power flagged—but his hopes ran high he’d string his father’s bow and shoot through every iron and now, struggling with all his might for the fourth time, he would have strung the bow, but Odysseus shook his head and stopped him short despite his tensing zeal.
“God help me,” the inspired prince cried out, “must I be a weakling, a failure all my life unless I’m just too young to trust my hands to fight off any man who rises up against me. Come, my betters, so much stronger than I am try the bow and finish off the contest.” (p428)
Solomon White 
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