This morning’s segment of The Intellectual Devotional
was about Homer, the legendary Greek bard who is said to have lived around the
7th Century BC. Specifically, it was about The Iliad and The
Odyssey, Homer’s most well-known works.
For those who don’t know, The Iliad is an account of
the Trojan War, in which the various city-states of Ancient Greece came
together to make war on the City of Troy across the Aegean Sea. It follows the
exploits of Achilles, a great warrior of Greek myth, and most famously gives an
account of the Trojan Prince Hector’s death at Achilles’ hand. For centuries, The
Iliad was thought to be wholly fictional until the city itself was
discovered by a team of archaeologists in the late 1800s. While many aspects of
The Iliad are undoubtedly fictional, it now seems likely that there are
some broad truths to the narrative and that there likely was a war of some kind
that ended with the city’s destruction.
The Odyssey focuses on the Greek hero Odysseus (for whom the story is named), at whose suggestion the famous Trojan Horse was built and the city conquered at last by the Greeks. Unlike many of the other Greek kings and generals involved, Odysseus’s trip home took many years, owing largely to his having offended the Greek God Poseidon, who continuously used his power over the seas to make Odysseus’s life miserable. He encountered a multitude of obstacles, villains, and monsters seeking to prevent his journey, ultimately killing his crew and destroying his ship. Odysseus did eventually return home only to discover his house full of suitors seeking to marry his still-faithful wife Penelope and seize control of his wealth.
I’ve been familiar with The Odyssey since I was a
child. I think we read about it in elementary school sometime, but I re-read it
several times after that on my own. I was aware of The Iliad as well,
but it never really captured my attention, possibly because it’s the story of a
war, but The Odyssey appealed to me on several levels, mostly because it
was the story of someone who just wanted to go home to his family and had to
fight through obstacle after obstacle to get there. In many ways, I think of it
as a very early superhero story (which are really just modern myths). Odysseus
is very much a precursor to characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man and
Captain America, just as Hercules, Achilles, Paul Bunyan, the Lone Ranger and Zorro
are. We seem to have a psychological need for heroes, for people who are larger
than life and who we can aspire to be like. And there’s nothing wrong with that
so long as we don’t take it too literally or unquestioningly.