The Odyssey and the Journey to Oneself

This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the New Acropolis Chicago premises on July 26^th, 2026.

Let us begin with a question.

No matter where you look today – whether it’s in online posts or discussion forums or in physical bookstores - the story of the Odyssey appears. Why has the Odyssey, a 3,000-year-old story, make a return to our collective consciousness?

Certainly, Christopher Nolan’s movie has something to do with it, but Toy Story 5 has also been released at the same time, and we don’t see so many discussions online over it. It’s also hard to believe that anyone will be interested in Woody and Buzz 50 years from now, not to mention 3000 years. So what do we actually have in common with Odysseus, a Greek king, who is sometimes called in the book, "the destroyer of cities"?

Clearly, there are timeless elements in this story; elements that come from a specific time and place but don’t belong to that specific time and place – elements that transform a story into a classic. It is a classic not because it is old, but because it is timeless.

Some background

A little history. The Mycenaean age was the age of legends that inspired the Odyssey. Then came the Greek Dark Ages - a period of about 400 years, characterized by a loss of social organization and literacy. And then a kind of Greek "Renaissance," a rebirth of Greek culture, which is the period in which Homer lived.

The Iliad and the Odyssey come out of that world, and they focus on completely different things. The Iliad is about war and glory - Kleos. The Odyssey is about Nostos, the longing for home; a return home. But it's not just a return home after buying groceries — it is a triumphant return home after vanquishing your trials successfully.Through a certain lens, we can say the Iliad is about conquering the external world – defeating others. The Odyssey is about conquering ourselves.

Ithaca

The first time we actually see Odysseus in the story - Book 5 - he's sitting on a rocky beach, staring at the horizon, weeping. A far cry from the common image of the hero. Why is he crying? He has not been made captive by some foreign army. He's trapped by Calypso, a divinely beautiful nymph-goddess who wants to marry him and give him eternal life. Being seduced by an astonishing nymph-goddess is not the worst fate one can imagine.  

Nevertheless, Odysseus spurns her. He wants to go back to his human wife, his human family, his human kingdom, with all its human problems. This is our first real glimpse of Odysseus. He is by no means a perfect protagonist. He has many flaws. But the one thing that never wavers anywhere in his journey: he never forgets his purpose. Ithaca. And that perhaps is precisely what makes him a hero.

And it's also the first lesson we can take from the Odyssey - our prisons in life, the things that keep us from realizing our potential, do not always look like prisons from the outside. Sometimes they look like the opposite.

What's interesting about the Odyssey's goal is that it isn't aimed at somewhere new, which is where most journeys go. It's aimed at going back to where you started. This is, in fact, a classic Hero's Journey in Joseph Campbell's sense - a journey back to where you began, except different. This is a transformative journey, and Odysseus eventually doesn't come back to Ithaca the same way he left it.

Which raises an interesting question for reflection: what is our Ithaca? What is your Ithaca? At some level, I think we each have our own, and it's unique to us. But if we want to talk about it more generally, we can borrow from the Greek philosophers — Socrates, Plato, Aristotle — who spoke of the ultimate aim of human life as happiness, or more precisely, Eudaimonia. For the Greek philosophers, Eudaimonia was an end of itself, it is not a means to achieve something else. It may look different for each individual, but we all, underneath it all, want to achieve happiness, and it’s fair to say that everything we do in life aims towards that direction.

The Stops in the Journey

We can read Odysseus's journey as having 12 stops or 12 trials. It arises naturally out of the story, and at each stop there's an important experience and lesson Odysseus has to move through. Every stop is necessary for him to become what he has to become by the end. We too have trials in our lives. We tend to appreciate the moments where things are good and to reject the difficult moments, but every experience in our lives, if we approach it with a certain state of mind, is a steppingstone towards who we are meant to be.

Let us look at two of these trials in the Odyssey: the Lotus Eaters and the Cyclops.

The Lotus Eaters — memory and forgetting

In this stop Odysseus and his crew reach the island of the Lotus Eaters. He sends two of his crew to scout the island, and these two are hosted by the people of the island who share with them their lotuses. Once these two eat the lotus,

“which was so delicious that those who ate of it left off caring about home, and did not even want to go back and say what had happened to them, but were for staying and munching lotus with the Lotus-eaters without thinking further of their return.”

Eventually Odysseus himself had to come over and literally drag these two sailors back to the ship, struggling and crying.

This trial is about memory and forgetfulness. But it’s not about forgetting someone's name or something on the stove. We are talking about forgetting something essential - where we're from, and where we're going.The Lotus represents everything that can make us forget who we are. In life, we often set out on a certain path in search of happiness. We see it on the horizon, and a path seems to head that way, so we follow it. But at some point, without our noticing, the path starts to curve, stops leading toward the horizon of happiness, and heads somewhere else entirely. And yet we keep walking it, because we "ate the lotus." We got so attached to the path itself that we forgot why we started walking it in the first place.

We've done this collectively, too. This stop feels like a mirror of where our society is right now. We have no real idea where we're going. We've forgotten the purpose of the human journey. And because we don't know where we're going, we've turned our means into our aims - our tools have become the point. We're walking a road to nowhere, oblivious to the destination, but at least we're wearing amazing shoes while we are walking it.

That's why Plato taught that to learn is to remember. He wasn't so interested in the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake - he cared about a process of learning that reminds us of fundamental truths already embedded in in us.

To leave the land of the Lotus Eaters, we have to ‘drag’ ourselves away from everything that makes us forget - the way Odysseus dragged his sailors. We have to want to remember, because – as strange as it may seem - our forgetfulness is often intentional because remembering comes with responsibility - the responsibility of not settling for a life of ease.

The Cyclops of Reductionism

This is one of the two most well-known stops in the whole journey where Odysseus lands in the land of the Cyclopes – great one-eyed monsters.

Homer chooses to emphasize that the Cyclopes are "Lawless savages; no assemblies or laws." And the purpose of Odysseus is to check whether they are "wild savages with no sense of right or wrong, or hospitable folk who fear the gods." Furthermore, when he introduces himself to the Cyclops, he says:"Now we are here, suppliants to your knees, hoping you will be generous to us, and give us the gifts that are due to strangers. Respect the gods, sir. We are your suppliants, and Zeus avenges strangers and suppliants…"But the Cyclops responds:"You are dumb, stranger, or from far away, if you ask me to fear the gods. Cyclopes don't care about Zeus (…) or the blessed gods, since we are much stronger…"This is followed by grabbing two of Odysseus's companions, smashing them on the floor and devouring them.

Xenia - hospitality, or guest-friendship - was a sacred value among the Greeks and ancient peoples generally. It had practical purposes in pre-Airbnb times, but on a higher level it also spoke to an acknowledgment of the god within every human being - that there's something sacred in every person. You had the responsibility to feed and shelter a guest even before you asked their name and where they are from.

The word "sacred" may perhaps feel old-fashioned now, almost superstitious - for a sophisticated modern thinker, nothing is sacred, there are no sacred cows. And yet even in a secular world the sacred, as a reference to an invisible dimension - a recognition of something in a person, place, or thing that goes beyond its utility or its physical characteristics.

Think about a family photo album. On the physical level, it's just paper. But for us it's worth far more than that. Think about a funeral - you're not going to show up in Crocs cracking jokes while the priest or rabbi is speaking. On the physical level, it's just a piece of flesh going into the ground. Think about someone spraying graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial or the 9/11 Memorial. You could say it's just chemical paint on stone. But it isn't.

These are all moments where we recognize a value beyond the physical properties of a thing - where the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts. Where something is sacred.

Some philosophers argue that this ability to assign metaphysical value is a distinctly human trait. Mircae Eliade, the Romanian philosopher and historian of religions who taught at the University of Chicago for thirty years, said we are not just homo sapiens, the thinking man, but homo religiosus - not because we are part of an institutional religion but because we search for meaning beyond the physical world - even in a secular society.

Cannibalism (also present later in the book, among the Laestrygonians) is the ultimate expression of losing the sense of the sacred. Something about it is abhorrent to us: the human being reduced to nothing more than flesh and bones, useful only as meat.

Two 20th-century philosophers warned us about exactly this. Simone Weil, the French mystic and philosopher, who believed the essence of morality lies in how we care for others. She said, "What is sacred, far from being the person, is what is impersonal in a human being." In other words, there's something sacred in a person that lies beyond their particular characteristics - their job, their skin color, their nationality.

Martin Buber, the Austrian-Israeli philosopher, spoke of two kinds of relationships: I-Thou and I-It. An I-It relationship sees the other as a means to a goal, measured by their usefulness and productivity - a mentality that might feel familiar from some corporations, where a person's worth scales with their output. An I-Thou relationship, by contrast, recognizes the sacred dimension of the other person as a presence and a mystery beyond their utility. As Buber put it: "When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them."

Polyphemus, the cyclops, is entirely locked into an I-It relationship with other human beings, symbolized by the act of cannibalism itself. But we too can become "one-eyed" - seeing only the utilitarian dimension of life, where everything becomes a means to our own ends.

Saint-Exupéry writes in The Little Prince, "What is essential is invisible to the eyes, only the heart can see clearly." But we look at the world and try to understand it with our physical eyes -with intellect alone - and we forget the heart.

The Cyclops seals himself in a prison of his own making. He's the person who already "knows" everything, who has settled into a rigid, inflexible view of life and is no longer interested in seeking the truth, because he believes he already has it.

Like Odysseus, we have to pierce that one eye, so that, symbolically, we can start seeing with our inner eyes, with our heart.