Editor’s note: My salon series on The Odyssey continues on Thursday, March 12. The session will cover Books 9-12 (only 76 pages). A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

It isn’t until Book 5 that we meet our protagonist. We find Odysseus …

sitting by the shore as usual, sobbing in grief and pain; his heart was breaking. In tears he stared across the fruitless sea.1

Calypso, after seven years and at the direction of Zeus (himself influenced by the dogged Athena), will let Odysseus leave if he chooses. His first words immediately reveal the core of his identity. Metis, his skillful cunning. He presumes the gods are up to their usual tricks; the offer of passage back home must be a scheme against him. Calypso calls him a “scalawag” and praises his understanding of “how these things work.”2 But there is no trick, and Odysseus will make his first, and most consequential, decision.

Calypso has offered him immortality if he agrees to stay, but he refuses. Why, in Zeus’ name, would he turn down an eternity on a mythical island of plenty with a beautiful goddess?

The answer lies in nostos, or homecoming, the central theme of the epic. It’s where we get the word “nostalgia.” Odysseus is weeping on the shores of Ogygia, nostalgic for home. Let the suffering it will take to get there be damned. Odysseus craves nostos. But his homecoming can’t be achieved by simply setting foot on Ithaca. Homecoming means reclaiming his identity. He longs for himself.

In immortality Odysseus would lose himself. The verdant island has “sights to please even a god” with an ageless goddess who desperately loves him, yet it is devoid of society and pursuit.3 Without society, there can be no relational identity. He is a husband and a father. A king. None of these have any meaning away from home. Without pursuits, the multitudes he contains have no outlet. There are no tools for a master shipbuilder and no ways to apply his nimble mind. For Odysseus, to choose immortality would be to choose everlasting ennui.

During his first tentative reentry into society among the Phaeacians, his heroic identity reemerges when he is goaded into competition and wins. He is not simply returning home. He is returning to his conception of self. Odysseus’ choice to forsake Calypso and regain himself through his nostos offers a lesson for modern readers. Identity is forged through persistent action.

Action requires courage and suffering. In spurning Calypso, who is reminding Odysseus she surpasses Penelope in beauty, this is what he tells her:

But even so, I want to go back home, and every day I hope that day will come. If some god strikes me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it. By now I am used to suffering—I have gone through so much, at sea and in the war. Let this come too.4

“Let this come too.” For a man who, we will learn, has gone through years of tribulations between the war and landing on Calypso’s island, it’s a much bolder statement than it seems at first blush. He knows he will endure an incredible amount of suffering along the way. He has no illusions that the journey will be easy, yet he sets out anyway. He has confidence in his own resilience and metis. As Wilson says in the introduction, “it is the kind of cleverness that enables one to prepare for any new challenge and come out as a winner.” One of Odysseus’ most common epithets is “much-enduring.” Odysseus knows he possesses the endurance it takes to get home.

The times I’ve been most disconnected from myself, when I’ve felt most lost, were the times that I was afraid to “let this come too.” I saw minor obstacles on the horizon and convinced myself they were as fearsome as Scylla and Charybdis. I used them as excuses not to leave the harbor. Humans have a tremendous capacity to adapt, endure, and reinvent, but only if we act. And we act in accordance with who we believe we are. Do we see ourselves as capable? Are we willing to “let it come too” knowing we have the courage, metis, and endurance to find our way?

Odysseus reminds us of what we can endure and what we might find if we do. Ourselves.

Join us!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along here. Join us on Thursday, March 12 for Books 9-12.

I hope to see you there! If you enjoyed this essay, here are more links related to the salon series.

• Watch past sessions on Youtube

  • Session 1

  • Session 2

  • Session 3

• Essays:

  • Session 1, Don’t die without reading The Odyssey

  • Session 2, Reflections on the Telemachy, Books 1-4 of The Odyssey

• Interintellect Hostcast podcast with Joao (summary on X)

• X thread on fun little details I’m learning, updated as I reread The Odyssey

Get tickets here!

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Editor’s note: This evening we return to our salon series on The Odyssey. This session will cover Books 1-4 (only 75 pages). A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

I didn’t plan this follow-up to my earlier essay, “Don’t die without reading The Odyssey,” but I’m having too much fun with The Odyssey not to keep writing about it. Here are a few ideas and reflections that came to mind as I reread The Telemachy, Books 1-4 of The Odyssey.

Mythology as delight

In Book 1, a line jumped out at me:

“With that, the owl-eyed goddess

flew away like a bird, up through the smoke.”1

I didn’t get the reference. Why is Athena called owl-eyed? With a little help from ChatGPT, my constant reading companion, I learned that Athena was symbolized by an owl and an owl’s presence is a sign of her blessing. That ancient association is one of the main reasons owls are still symbols of wisdom today. I had no idea.

Only a few weeks ago, I woke up to two great horned owls duetting (a kind of mating dance) outside my window. It was a delightful experience in its own right, but now when I see those owls in the neighborhood I have the added joy of laughing to myself that the gods must be wishing me a blessed day. The more I learn about Greek mythology, and the more I connect it to the world around me, the more delightful the world seems to become.

This extends to common language. Greek roots and mythology permeate English. There are too many examples to count, but let’s start with the obvious. Our word for a long, arduous journey — odyssey — is the title of the book. Doesn’t it make a road trip in a Honda Odyssey, packed with young kids, far funnier and more pleasant when you can compare your own plight to that of Odysseus? I too have traveled in the presence of what felt like a screaming, multi-headed monster and collapsed in exhaustion at my destination. More whimsy like this in our culture, please.

Mentor(ship)

Mentor is another example of a word lifted straight from the pages of The Odyssey. He is an important character, especially in Books 1-4.

“When Odysseus sailed off,

this was the friend he asked to guard his house

and told the slaves to look to him as master.”2

This is not the real Mentor, ineffectually managing Odysseus’s home, from which we get our word “mentor.” It’s a reference to the wisdom of Athena. She disguises herself as Mentor to guide Telemachus, Odysseus’s son, when he sets sail for news of his father and counsels him along the way.

What struck me as I read passages of Athena mentoring Telemachus was the way she encourages and teaches him to trust his own judgment and abilities. This is the foundation of good mentorship, ancient or modern.

“But Mentor, how

can I approach and talk to him? I am

quite inexperienced at making speeches,

and as a young man, I feel awkward talking

to elders.

She looked straight into his eyes,

and answered, “You will work out what to do,

through your own wits and with divine assistance.

The gods have blessed you in your life so far.”3

The best mentors help their mentee through a “becoming.” What Telemachus wants to become is a grown man able to take matters into his own hands. Becoming can also mean something more subtle. A mentee could want to become a lover of art, become a better father, or simply become more knowledgeable in a given domain. What matters is a mentor able to encourage and direct and a mentee with judgment and the ability to act. So it is with Athena and Telemachus.

But mentorship need not require heroic commitment or divine intervention. Assistance towards becoming can be temporary, bounded by topic, and unconstrained by relative ages. We should all be looking for more ways to offer encouragement and direction for those seeking to become.

Xenia

Family lore says I’m a descendant of an Irishman who came to America during the potato famine. I don’t think of myself as an Irish-American; my heritage just doesn’t come up that often. There is one exception, and it’s not St. Patrick’s Day. It’s immigration.

I think about that ancestral grandfather and what it must have felt like to be an Irish immigrant in the mid-1800s. When he set sail in search of a better life, I wonder whether his wildest dreams could account for how good his distant grandson has it? With the xenophobia he faced, I doubt it.4 Today I can write under the byline Mulligan about The Odyssey and my name triggers thoughts of golf, not destitution. “We” Irish have come a long way.

I couldn’t get this anecdote, or thoughts about immigration more broadly, out of my head as I read The Odyssey. One of the dominant themes of the story is xenia. Xenia is a moral and sacred code governing norms of hospitality between hosts and strangers, and the first four books are one big moralizing lesson in how to uphold it properly.

Within the first few pages of Book 1, good and bad examples of xenia are laid out. Telemachus welcomes Mentes (Athena in disguise), feeds him, and honors him before he even learns his name. The suitors camped out in Odysseus’ absence show anti-xenia behavior. They overstay their welcome, destroy wealth, and show no gratitude. Throughout The Odyssey, good hosts uphold xenia and are rewarded for it. Monsters and villains who violate it court catastrophe. The poem’s moral universe revolves around xenia. Without it, society decays.

It got me thinking about how we treat the strangers who show up on our shores today. We educate and then force international students back home. We have random lotteries for H-1B visas instead of policies to keep high-skilled workers here permanently. Visa wait times and renewal processes are longer and more harrowing than some of Odysseus’s tribulations. If that’s how we play host to the most talented strangers, how likely is it we’re treating our more ragged guests well?

The xenia described in The Odyssey is not a great guide to immigration policy. Xenia is about how individual guests, not a diaspora, are treated. It covers brief encounters, a guest passing through, not settlement. Yet I think xenia still has something to teach us. The formal protocols of xenia are oddly comforting. More than that, the rules of xenia are coherent. There is morality in clear rules of the road.

Join us!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along with the series here. Can’t make it this time? Join us on Thursday, February 12 for Books 5-8.

I hope to see you there! If you enjoyed this essay, here are links to more of my thoughts on The Odyssey so far.

• Session 1, Introduction: Don’t die without reading The Odyssey

• Interintellect Hostcast podcast with (summary on X)

• X thread on fun little details I’m learning, updated as I reread The Odyssey

Get tickets here!

Share

Editor’s note: Tonight (Thursday, Dec 11) we kick off an salon series on The Odyssey! Tonight’s session will be an introduction, so don’t worry if you don’t have time to read anything beforehand. A few seats are still available, and you’re warmly invited.

Get tickets here!

Why read a nearly 3,000-year old poem? The short answer is because Christopher Nolan is making it into a movie. Earlier this year, my brother sent me this photo with a text: “should we read the book before this comes out?”

My brother had never read The Odyssey, and I hadn’t for decades. We both felt a little sheepish about the gap in our bibliography. Plus, everyone knows the book is always better than the movie.

The idea of a salon was born.

The greatest story ever told

The Odyssey is not a stuffy old poem. I’ve come to love The Odyssey the way Tolkien fans love The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) for its epic quest and deep mythology. Ostensibly, The Odyssey is about Odysseus’ long journey home following the Trojan War. But that’s like saying LOTR is about a man delivering a ring. It’s a coming of age story about Odysseus’ son Telemachus. It’s an examination of women’s agency, told through Odysseus’ wife Penelope. It’s an adventure story interwoven with layers of ancient mythology. The Odyssey is arguably the greatest story ever told.

More than a classic, The Odyssey is the foundation of Western storytelling and the archetype of the hero’s journey. We’ve all heard references to the one-eyed Cyclops, the irresistible call of the Sirens, Circe, and Calypso. The characters and stories in The Odyssey are our shared heritage. And despite being nearly 3,000 years old, its themes of homecoming, identity, and hospitality remain as relevant as ever.

And then there’s the divine drama. Today athletes pray to the same God and hope to be the chosen victor. In The Odyssey, the gods have chosen sides: Poseidon wants Odysseus to suffer; Athena thinks he’s suffered enough. The clash between gods is more dramatic than any clash between even godlike mortals could ever be.

Constraining herself to the exact number of lines in the original poem, Emily Wilson’s translation is accessible and cuts straight to the heart of the epic. No need to be familiar with archaic language. The Odyssey, especially this version, is wildly entertaining. To paraphrase , “don’t die without reading The Odyssey. It’s not worth it.”

It’s better together

But why a salon? My brother and I could have read the book alone. Because The Odyssey is an oral tradition. It’s not a story meant to be read quietly to oneself. It’s meant to be shared.

The beauty of Interintellect salons is that they aren’t lectures. They’re collaborative discussions. We could have agreed to read the same book and met once. But by breaking it down, meeting over multiple sessions, and making it a live event we get a far more robust experience.

When you attend a salon, you’re actually co-creating and shaping the discussion by bringing your unique perspectives and life experiences. No need to be an expert in classical literature. I’ve done the research to help add context, but everyone sees and is compelled by something different: moral, literary, emotional, historical, or personal. When we read together we expand what’s visible.

When I reread The Odyssey last month to prepare for the salon, I was surprised by how quickly it felt relatable and relevant. The first great lesson for me came from Emily Wilson’s introduction. She explains that The Odyssey doesn’t start at the beginning of Odysseus’ journey, but in the middle of things (in medias res). We don’t hear from Odysseus directly until Book 5 (The Odyssey is split into 24 books, essentially chapters). It’s such a simple idea, but it immediately helped me fix a structural problem in an essay I was struggling with.

The second surprise was how strongly the book’s great theme of hospitality, or xenia, resonated. Characters and entire societies are judged by how they treat strangers and how welcoming they are to guests. In The Odyssey, good hospitality is a moral and sacred responsibility. Guests have responsibilities too. Anyone thinking about immigration or social trust would benefit from a thorough reading. Closer to home, xenia shaped my 2026 New Year’s resolutions. I hope to host far more dinner and weekend guests in the coming year. I want my home to be a place of warmth for any guest needing a respite on their journey.

That’s what stood out to me. What will we discover together?

Join us!

This salon is for you whether The Odyssey is your favorite book, was forced upon you in high school, or it’s your first time. We’ll be meeting once a month from December 2025-July 2026 to keep the reading load manageable (roughly 75 pages or fewer per session).1 Can’t catch tonight’s session? Join us in January when we begin reading the full text in earnest!

Find all the information you need to sign up and follow along here. I hope to see you there!

Get tickets here!

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