Reading Book 5, we get a sense of the erotic motivation for Odysseus’ journey home. We find elsewhere in The Odyssey other kinds of desires, like desire for civilization and for proper status.
We see that civilized society is important to ancient Greek culture: Book 9 gives us Odysseus’ famous confrontation with the cyclops. When Odysseus and his men land on uncharted territory, they search the place to see what kind of people live there. Odysseus recounts that the land is filled with “Lawless savages who leave everything / Up to the gods. These people neither plow nor plant, / But everything grows for them unsown” (9.104-6). A marker of good civilization, then, is cultivation. Greek culture was devoted to the gods, but only “lawless savages” left everything up to the gods. Agricultural work made for a good society.
Odysseus also says that the Cyclopes “have no assemblies or laws but live / In high mountain caves, ruling their own / Children and wives and ignoring each other” (9.110-12). Greek culture understood personal identity in terms of social structures. The sense of individuation that we have was considered an aberration from the norm. Even families were not the sole social marker of a person’s identity. Greeks were part of a larger civil community that was important to their understanding of the self. The Cyclopes reveal their monstrosity by “ignoring each other.”
Elsewhere we find that the Cyclopes have no craftsmen and they don’t eat bread. It turns out, in fact, that the Cyclopes are cannibalistic, and the drama of Book 9 is centered on Odysseus’ witty escape from a hungry cyclops.
Now, if civilization is one desire, the return to proper status is another. What is interesting about The Odyssey, I think, is the way Odysseus returns to his proper status in his household. He has to mask himself as a beggar. Instead of coming in, “guns a-blazing,” Odysseus takes a more indirect route to regaining his status at home. The Greek ideal of warrior status found in The Iliad is here challenged by the image of a hero who seeks glory by first debasing himself.
