Using Classics to Explore Home
My story, sadly enough, isn’t an uncommon one. When I was eight years old, my parents divorced after years of fighting. It was the right move for them, but they didn’t really think about how it would affect me and my brother. I don’t really have much memory of my childhood, but what I do remember of it was waking up at night to loud arguments in the years leading up to the divorce, the three-hour car rides between my parents’ houses on the weekends after the divorce, and the manipulation both of my parents used to get me to spend more time at their house. I remember moving so often when they were still together that I had a hard time making friends. I got into the mentality of not getting attached to people or places because I knew we were just going to move in a year or so anyway. My sense of home was so distorted and I felt uncomfortable making friends with people. The only person I felt was always there for me and who understood how I felt was my older brother. During middle school, I had to choose which parent to live with to be able to have a semi-normal high school experience. When I was reading the ancient texts, I found the idea of home within them stuck out to me. This idea not only enriched my perspective of the texts and the characters within them but also allowed me to reflect and understand my own life in new ways.
Odysseus’s journey is a long and winding story of tragedies that undoubtedly instilled a sense of isolation within him that I felt much empathy for. Although this journey is brought on by his own malfeasance of blinding Polyphemus, his experience of losing his sense of home is very similar to my own. After ten long years of war at Troy, Odysseus embarks on what ends up being his ten-year journey home. Eventually, all of his crew dies and Odysseus finds solace in his seven-year stay with the sea nymph named Calypso. While he is leaving Calypso he explains how Penelope “falls far short of [her],/ [her] beauty, stature. [Penelope] is mortal after all/…Nevertheless I long–I pine, all my days–/to travel home and see the dawn of my return” (Odyssey Book 5 p.159, lines 239–243. Robert Fagles’ translation). I felt a personal connection to Odysseus’s position. This connection he made with Calypso was really just a substitute for belonging he yearns for with Penelope and his home. After going through so much loss in his life it is understandable that he indulged in such temporary satisfaction with Calypso. But in the end, he realizes that no connection will compare to what he has with Penelope and his true home. After moving so many times and losing so many friendships along the way, I myself have been in this position. I have felt the need to fill that feeling of isolation with forced friendships and trying to fit in as someone I knew I wasn’t. Approaching the reading with this created a dialogue between me and the text. It developed my understanding of Odysseus in that he wasn’t just sleeping around to have fun, he was trying to fill a void created by his loss of home. It also developed an understanding of my own life in that finding a true home requires me to be true to myself.
Another connection I made while reading the Odyssey was around how people react when their sense of home is threatened. Odysseus returning to his home only to find it filled with suitors plotting to destroy his home ended in him viciously killing them as well as several of the maids. These suitors were threatening his idea of home, namely his family’s house and the people he calls family. After stringing his bow and killing the ringleader of the suitors (Antinous), Odysseus goes into a bloodthirsty rage. In this rage, he begins shouting “You dogs! You never imagined I’d return from Troy — /so cocksure that you bled my house to death,/ ravished my serving-women — wooed my wife/behind my back while I was still alive! / No fear of the gods who rule the skies up there…your doom is sealed” (Odyssey Book 22 p. 440, lines 36–42. Robert Fagles’ translation). Although Odysseus’ rage is over the top and his slaughter of the maids is completely unjustified, I empathize with the origin of this rage. For me, a lot of people were ephemeral parts of my life and I found it difficult to form new relationships so I found a kind of home in my pursuit of academics. During high school I joined several clubs that would challenge me to succeed and, for the most part, I did. But the community I was succeeding in wasn’t the type of community accommodating of lofty ambitions. It was a small rural town with a general carefree attitude. They admire “the simple things in life.” This community eventually developed a sense of complacency within me that stood as an obstacle to my ambition. It fostered anger within myself and I took this anger out on my perspective of the community, feeding into my predisposition for isolation. I formed a disdain for the community and many people in it, which I now see as misplaced anger. This anger that I had was born out of a similar situation as Odysseus’s rampage. I lashed out to the community because of its more relaxed and carefree nature because I saw it as threatening my sense of home, my ambition.
When Hector returned from the battlefield to within the walls of Troy, I reflected on what home represents. I reflected on how it pushes an individual to sacrifice for something bigger than themself. Andromache begs Hector to stay within the city and live on to care for their son. With a nod and a flash of his helmet, Hector objected with “All this weighs on my mind too, dear woman./ But I would die of shame to face the men of Troy/ and the Trojan women trailing their long robes/ if I would shrink from battle now, a coward” (Iliad Book 6 p.210, lines 521–525. Robert Fagles’ translation). Hector decides that dying for the greater good of Troy is easier to deal with than living as a coward for the rest of his life. The Trojans are fighting for their lives and Hector’s brothers are dying all around him. Hector is considered the “lone defense of Troy” (Iliad Book 6 p.209, line 478. Robert Fagles’ translation) by the Trojans. Everyone looks up to him as the protector of the city and if he were to abandon his brothers on the battlefield, it would disgrace his name and his family. Even though Hector would like nothing more than to spend his remaining life in the company of his family, he realizes that his presence on the battlefield is more important for the good of his brothers and by extension his community. He is willing to die for his community.
When I read this I realized I didn’t share this same sense of home. I didn’t feel the drive to bond over some mutual sense of home and community like Hector did with his brothers in arms. I think my circumstances made it hard to form these connections in the first place, but I also think the idea of home has changed since antiquity. They saw the concept of home in a more collective sense than we do today. Although we might fight for our friends and family, I think very few of us would be willing to sacrifice our lives for a bigger sense of community in the way that Hector did. Obviously, we don’t encounter the same scenario nearly as often as they did in antiquity. It happened so often in antiquity that they formed much of their education and social structures around getting people ready for war (the most prominent example is the Spartan society). In their time, the idea of home was a structure that you were born into and something you were expected to die for. This expectation isn’t as present in our current society and the shift is more towards supporting those within your home. Reading the text in this way made me realize that my sense of home is flawed. I don’t feel connected to a community but rather the pursuit of building my own life, independent of my family. I hope that my ambition drives me to a sense of home similar to what Hector had or at least the present-day version of that sense of home.
Another idea intimately connected to the idea of home is family and love. Although Helen’s idea of family may be twisted by her possible abduction by Paris, I found vivid connections within her situation to my experiences. Helen’s situation at the center of the Trojan war reminded me of my situation at the center of my parents’ divorce. When Priam asked Helen who the “stark and grand” Achaean was on the battlefield (Agamemnon), Helen responded quite dramatically while reminiscing the land she left behind. She had mixed feelings when she said “I revere you so, dear father, dread you too — /if only death had pleased me then, grim death,/ that day I followed your son to Troy, forsaking/ my marriage bed, my kinsmen and my child, my favorite, now full-grown,/ and the lovely comradeship of women my own age” (Iliad Book 3 p. 134, lines 208–213. Robert Fagles’ translation). Helen misses the life she left behind but also acknowledges a connection to her new “father” and doesn’t know if she should be with Paris or Menelaus. She knows that there is much she left behind in her old life, but she also feels indebted to Aphrodite who threatens her to stay with Paris. Eventually, this overwhelming situation made her think her life would have been much more simple if she had just died. I want to state that I am not suicidal and never came to the same conclusion as Helen, but my situation in the middle of my parents’ divorce forced a similar sense of conflict on me. I felt conflicted between continuing to live with my dad and moving to live with my mom. Helen’s decision was forced on her by means of divine force but it’s possible Homer was using Aphrodite’s influence as an allegory for the force of love. How was I supposed to decide between my parents at such a young age? It wasn’t until recently that I looked back on that moment and realized that my parents manipulated me to try and get me to make this decision, much like how Aphrodite manipulated Helen. Reading the passage with this in mind helped me shift my perspective of my parents from childhood to what I know to think of them today. During childhood, like many other people, I thought my parents were like gods and I should believe what they do and say are virtuous truths I must follow. Now when I look back on them with the text in mind, I can see how gods are selfish beings that use humans for their own gain. Additionally, I appreciate the human perspective of this indebted feeling towards the gods and understand why Helen bent to the will of Aphrodite. Using the Iliad as a way to explore ancient history allowed me to explore my own life and understand concepts from their culture that are somewhat foreign to the present day.
Throughout this semester I learned a lot about the world of classics and how applicable it still is to the present day. Learning classic through appreciating its diversity is valuable in a twofold sense. The first level is to learn the origins of many cultures and social structures like religion and democracy. Because of these wider connections to the present day, the second level is much more personal: applying the themes and experiences of people in the ancient world to our own individual life. For me, the experience of reading the texts of the Iliad and the Odyssey allowed me to grasp more perspective on my sense of home and how my parents’ divorce affected me. Writing this essay was both a cathartic experience and an opportunity to gain perspective on my past experiences. Living through this pandemic forced me to adapt to every aspect of my life and it is easy to lose focus on the idea of home or even what the future might hold for me when just getting to the end of the week can be a struggle. Reading the Homeric texts was a very therapeutic experience for me and I would highly recommend anyone who feels like they lost sight of home during these trying times to embark on a journey with Homer, exploring the ancient world and regaining that sense of home.
By Merrick Scholz
Help for this essay came from my TA Amie Goblirsch and peer Andrew Dai.
