The Search for Self and the Return Home: In Conversation with Eugenia Manolidou

Homer has cleared this out in the first ten verses of the Odyssey, saying, finishing the introduction, the proemion in the Odyssey, «Ton amothen iethea digater Dios ipecimin telas» any way you want, in any order you like.

Tell us what is happening with this man in any way you want.

So it's the muse, according to Homer, that is telling everything in the way that she wants.

It's the voice of the muse in Homer's poetry.

So we should not forget that Odysseus is polytropos, is a man of many different ways.

He's very smart, but he's also a human being.

He's also a man.

So he does make mistakes because this is what being a human being is about.

He learns from the mistakes.

He does not repeat the mistakes.

And he's humiliated.

I mean, being so close to Ithaca and then going back and starting over again.

This is humiliating.

And then he decides to be so humble and to do whatever he has to do for him to go back home and stay there for, you know, the years left.

But another very important fact is that The Odyssey does not only speak to every human being.

It speaks to children as well.

We know the story.

We don't remember when we learned the Odyssey.

So there are so many different levels.

This is why this work is a masterpiece of the world of all times.

It speaks to children, it speaks to young people, to adults, to men, to women, to Europeans, to Americans, to people from China, Japan, Africa, everywhere.

There is something inside every human being that relates to Odysseus one way or another, be it Odysseus himself, be it Telemachus, be it Penelope, be it anything.

So, there are so many different levels that you can look into the word and discover something about yourself, about your own things that you have inside you, your feelings, your thoughts, your fears.

This is why Plato used to say that this poet educated the whole of Greece.

The poet educated the whole of Greece.