Ulysses

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1. 01

   Odysseus gets home and, in Tennyson's version, wants to leave again; Troy and the Odyssey remain the maps on which every century draws its own wars, homecomings and doubts.

   Ulysses · 1842

   Troy does not end: every century draws its own wars and homecomings on its map.

   The Odyssey ends with Odysseus on Ithaca: the suitors killed, the faithless maids punished, Penelope recognising him by the secret of the marriage bed, his father Laertes found again, and Athena stopping the civil war about to break out between the king and the families of the dead. It is a peace imposed from above, after a bloodbath — Homer does not idealise the homecoming. And the tradition after him does not let Odysseus stay home: Tiresias foretells a last voyage; Dante sends him beyond the pillars of Hercules and drowns him for curiosity; Tennyson has him, old, call his companions to one last departure. That is why Troy does not end. Every age has read it as its own: Rome was born of Aeneas; the crusaders called themselves Trojans; Shakespeare wrote "Troilus and Cressida" as a satire of senseless war; Simone Weil read the Iliad in 1940 as the poem of the force crushing Europe; Jonathan Shay saw Vietnam veterans in Achilles; Christopher Logue and Alice Oswald rewrote the Iliad as a twentieth-century poem; Cavafy made Ithaca the destination that matters less than the road. This shelf has attempted the same: to map the causes (the strait, the oath, prestige), the techniques (attrition, deception, the chariot, the mast) and the costs (Iphigenia, Hector, Andromache, Achilles's shade) — and to lay them over today's wars. The final parallel is Tennyson's: Ithaca is not hard to reach but hard to live in. Whoever returns from a long war — a soldier, a society — finds they have become someone else and that the old map no longer fits. Homer knew it; that is why he wrote two poems, not one.

   “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

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