“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”Alfred Tennyson · Ulysses · 1842 · Alfred Tennyson, «Ulysses» (1842), ultimul vers al poemului; versiunea românească e o redare a originalului englez
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.
The card says Ithaca is hard to live in. The next step is why Tennyson puts this in an old man's mouth. His Ulysses doesn't want another adventure; he wants to remain someone. For him, leaving isn't escape from home but the only way he still exists. That changes the story's meaning: identity lives not in places but in motion. Think of someone who retires after decades of work and, within three months, no longer recognizes their own life. The house is the same; they are not. Tennyson grasps that some people are made of the road, not the destination. Which raises the obvious question: if departure defines a person, what defines peoples, who also depart, into wars and rebuildings?
Why it matters Ithaca is not hard to reach but hard to live in: whoever returns from a long war finds they have become someone else.