Homer, and the War After the War

Ithaca, after Troy

The first voice in this book is not a speech. It is a poem, sung from memory at courts and in markets across the Greek-speaking world in the eighth or seventh century before our era, and written down in a form roughly recognizable as the one we read now at some point thereafter. The poem opens with an invocation and a name. Sing, Muse, of the man of many turns, who wandered far after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy. The Greek word for the man’s defining attribute is polytropos. It means many-turned, versatile, twisting, hard to pin down. He is named in the second line of the poem but only after his characteristic. The hero is not first a person. He is first a way of moving.

Most books on the literature of war begin with the Iliad. They begin with the rage of Achilles in the tenth year of the siege, the bronze and the spears and the bodies in the dust. This one begins with the Odyssey. The choice is deliberate, and it is one of the central arguments of this entire book. The Iliad is the great poem of battle. The Odyssey is the great poem of what happens after. The reader who begins with Troy has begun with the killing. The reader who begins with Ithaca has begun with everything the killing leaves behind.

When the poem opens, the war is supposedly over. Troy has fallen. The armies have dispersed. The great heroic contest is in the past. And yet peace has not returned. Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, has been gone twenty years. The first ten of those he spent at Troy. The second ten he has spent on the sea, blown off course, kept against his will, mourning, fighting, lying, surviving. At home, his wife Penelope is suspended between fidelity and pressure. His son Telemachus has grown into uncertain adulthood under a household of strangers. More than a hundred unmarried men have moved into the palace at Ithaca, drinking the wine, slaughtering the livestock, and waiting — courting Penelope ostensibly, consuming the estate actually. The household has been occupied. The boundary between home and battlefield has been quietly erased.

This is the situation the poem opens into. Not battle. Aftermath. And not the kind of aftermath that arrives with a treaty and a parade. The kind that arrives slowly, through the wrong door, with people in it who should not be there.

The book begins here because the question the Odyssey asks is the question the rest of this book will keep asking. War language does not stop when battle stops. It migrates. It moves into the household, into memory, into the language of the people who came back and the language of the people they came back to. The vocabulary the poem invents to describe this migration is the deep grammar of every later chapter — and, more importantly, of every later attempt to find words for what war leaves behind.

Nostos: the word for coming home

The Greek word at the center of the Odyssey is nostos. It is usually translated as return, or homecoming, and modern English readers tend to hear it as a soft word — the sound of a homecoming parade, a yellow ribbon, a relieved welcome. The Greek meaning is not soft. Nostos is the long, dangerous, often fatal movement back from war. Several of the major Greek heroes do not achieve it. Agamemnon comes home and is murdered by his wife and her lover within the hour. Ajax dies on the way. Menelaus is blown to Egypt and spends years getting back. The word names the most precarious portion of a warrior’s life — the part after the fighting is supposedly finished, when the official story says he is safe and he is in fact not safe at all.

Odysseus’s nostos takes ten years. By the time he reaches Ithaca, half the men he sailed with at Troy are dead, killed by sea, by monster, by their own appetite. He himself is unrecognizable. The poem is at pains to make this physically literal: the goddess Athena disguises him as a beggar before he sets foot in his own hall. He is recognized, when he is recognized, in stages — by his old dog, by an old nurse who bathes him and sees his scar, by his swineherd, by his son, finally by his wife. The recognition scenes are not warm. They are tests. The returning man must prove who he is to the people he left.

Nostos is therefore the first war-after-war word in Western literature. It names the problem the rest of the book will spend twenty-eight centuries trying to solve. How does a person formed by war come back to a society that wants peace and that has been changed, in his absence, by his absence? Modern military bureaucracies will eventually invent terms for the same problem: demobilization, reintegration, transition assistance, veteran services, reentry. Each is a piece of nostos translated into the institutional language of a particular era. None of them quite captures what the Greek word knew. The journey back is itself war.

The journey back is itself war.

Oikos: the household as the new battlefield

The Greek word for household is oikos. It is one of the most politically loaded words in the Greek language. The oikos is not merely the building. It is the family, the property, the slaves, the herds, the loyalty of dependents, the bed, the loom, the inherited objects, the line of descent. To control the oikos is to be the household’s head. To lose control of the oikos is to lose civic standing. When the poem describes a hundred men eating their way through Odysseus’s herds, it is describing the slow consumption of a kingdom’s legitimacy.

This is the second great move the poem makes. War has moved into the home. The enemy is no longer across the field. The enemy is in the kitchen, drinking the wine and pressing the wife. The men in the hall are not foreign soldiers. They are local young aristocrats. They have grown up in the same towns as Odysseus’s loyal retainers. They know the language. They eat with their hands at the king’s table. And they are, by the standards of the poem, occupiers. The category of internal enemy — the figure who looks like a member of the community but is, in some essential sense, behaving like an invader — is invented here in literary form. It will recur in the rest of this book in many shapes. The collaborator. The traitor. The fifth columnist. The insurgent. The extremist. The unlawful combatant. The categories will keep being reinvented, because the underlying situation keeps being lived: after war, the line between inside and outside becomes hard to draw, and someone has to draw it.