The Odyssey and the Art of Returning Home

I attempted to read The Odyssey several times over the years. Each attempt ended the same way. I would make it a hundred or two hundred pages before the book slipped from my hands and came to rest beside the chair, collecting dust while Odysseus continued his journey without me. 

Then one day, while traveling, I bought the audiobook. 

Some books are meant to be heard. 

Suddenly the story came alive. The voices, the rhythm, the repetition, and the cadence of an oral tradition carried across nearly three thousand years transformed what had felt distant on the page into something immediate and deeply human. I found myself listening not to an ancient hero, but to a man making decisions, some brilliant, many disastrous. An then there were the consequences. 

That may be one reason The Odyssey has endured for so long. 

Odysseus is clever, courageous, stubborn, prideful, impatient, resourceful, and occasionally foolish. He survives monsters, storms, temptations, and gods, but many of his greatest obstacles are of his own making. Reading the poem as an adult, I found myself noticing less the adventure and more the decisions. 

One episode has remained with me in particular. 

Knowing he cannot resist the song of the Sirens, Odysseus orders his crew to bind him to the mast of the ship. He does not trust his future self to make the right decision in the moment. Instead, he creates a system that allows him to survive his own weakness. 

When I first encountered the story, I admired the cleverness of the solution. Years later, I admired the restraint. 

Age has changed how I read books. 

The monsters become less interesting than the choices. The distant islands become less important than the question of how to navigate life. Home becomes more than a destination. It becomes an idea. 

The illustrations in The Odyssey: Myth, Memory, and the Wine-Dark Sea grew from that perspective. Rather than attempting to retell the epic, I wanted to explore the symbolic forces that continue to resonate across centuries: wisdom, temptation, endurance, longing, and return. 

Athena becomes the voice of intelligence and strategy. Circe embodies transformation. The Sirens represent irresistible knowledge. Penelope stands for patience and constancy. Charybdis becomes the consuming force of uncertainty itself. Even the sea transforms from a physical landscape into a map of human experience. 

At the center of it all is a journey home. 

With a new film adaptation bringing Homer’s epic to another generation, it seemed an appropriate moment to pay homage to a poem that has survived empires, languages, religions, technologies, and millennia. Few stories remain relevant for three thousand years. Fewer still continue to reveal new meanings each time we return to them. 

Perhaps that is the final lesson of The Odyssey. 

The voyage changes because I, the reader, have changed with time. 

Written by Paula Phelan, PiP Art Studio