HOME WORK

“Not Unbecoming Men Who Strove with Gods”

BY MARK BOTTS

“I long—I pine, all my days— To travel home and see the dawn Of my return”

The Odyssey

“How dull it is to pause, to make an end.”

“Ulysses,”

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Classical education promotes heroism. The title of hero, unfortunately, in recent years has been diluted. Everyone is a hero. Everyone is special. Or, to quote from the animated feature film Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, which grossed, worldwide, more than $375 million dollars: everyone is Spiderman. While classical education does not, should not, encourage the current, feeble idea of the hero, it should pay attention to a certain temptation common among heroes, for this temptation, like waves, crashes upon the souls of everyone. It is the allure that something greater awaits us, and that the greater thing awaiting us exists outside the home. Consequently, the home lies vacant.

In Homer’s epic the Odyssey, the hero desires to return home to Ithaca. Even a life with the beautiful, seductive goddess Calypso cannot keep Odysseus from wanting to return home because there abides his son, Telemechus, and his wife, “wise Penelope.”

Of course, home concerns not only husbands and wives and children. The place matters even to the single man and the single woman. However, for our purposes here, home implies family: husband, wife, children.

Readers of the Odyssey will root for Odysseus to reach Ithaca. They will hope for Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion. They will revel in the hero and his son’s slaughtering expulsion from their home of the evil suitors. The story ramps up again, just before its conclusion, as Odysseus and his homeland crew, composed, in part, of his son, Telemechus, and their loyal swineherd, set out to lay waste to other enemies. However, the narrative resolves when Athena, goddess of war, commands Odysseus and his homeland crew to stay from their adventurous pursuits. The epic’s last lines state that Odysseus “obeyed her, glad at heart / And Athena handed down her pacts of peace / between both sides for all the years to come” (XXIV.598–600). “Peace for all the years to come”: what a climate in which to live, in which to keep a home. But this is not where Odysseus, also known as Ulysses, will remain. Before we look more at this hero’s journey, let us consider a few things regarding education and the home.

With classical education’s chief mission being the cultivation of the human soul towards virtue, the

Odyssey, while not a Christian text, serves its readers well because it satisfies the human desire for heroes and adventure. Such heroes and adventure offer a great model with which the reader can form his soul according to virtue. And a clear mark of virtue is a love for the home. Nevertheless, the human desire for a heroic adventure can result in the home becoming a place to which we are either traveling or leaving, as opposed to abiding.

The tendency to not abide at home can even affect classical schools. The academic seasons rush along, sweeping up those involved. The rush, while necessary and inevitable, in some cases, threatens to keep us from contemplating the books we read or the ideas we encounter. The rush pushes us past ourselves, past each other, the natural world, and, most importantly, God.

But the academic season is not the only time of year in which we must be watchful of the hurry-up offense that seems to define our nation’s culture. Summertime can become just as rushed along with the rush of (sports) camps, road trips, and preemptive academic work. Consequently, during the academic or summertime months, the home is vacated. We are either rarely physically there, or we are there but occupied by a number of activities and (de)vices. Much has been said about the sinister, demonic clutches that our digital devices have sunk into our souls, so technology will not take stage here. Rather, the focus here will be the physical vacating of the home.

While the Odyssey resolves with peace and Odysseus being able to live with his wife and son in their home, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” picks up with the hero years later, finding the great adventurer ill-tempered for the noble work home requires. Tennyson’s account of Ulysses borrows from Dante’s poetic rendering of Ulysses. Both artists present a complex and compelling, though deeply flawed, hero: one who cannot abide living out his days at home.

At the CiRCE fall regional conference in October of 2022, Andrew Kern remarked that the romance film genre either tracks a relationship forming or falling to pieces. Rarely, if ever, does the genre follow a relationship that moves toward maturity, com- mitment, and virtue, thus reaching what Aristotle calls friendship’s highest form: goodness. Kern’s commentary landed on both feet. Film, which is housed under the literary roof of drama, relies on conflict. Conflict is easy to find when traveling, leaving (or visiting) home. Consequently, Ulysses encounters one conflict after another during his voyage to Ithaca, but once home, once at peace, he eventually becomes dissatisfied.

Why is this hero dissatisfied with being at home? Tennyson portrays Ulysses as a great man who cannot live an adventure-less life. The poem, which is a monologue, starts with Ulysses speaking to himself, then moves to him speaking to his crew. The reader discovers from the first lines that Ulysses thinks his life at home holds no honor:

It little profits that an idle king, By this still hearth, among these barren crags, Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink Life to the lees.(1–7)

Aside from comparing Ithaca’s barren crags with his aged wife, we should appreciate the hero’s frustration. He was a known man. A meritorious man. Who wants to stay in a place where they are not known? Who wants to end their days in anonymity? Ulysses’ proclamation that he “will drink / Life to the lees” makes for an enticing anthem.

Ulysses continues his monologue, claiming that his son Telemechus is better suited to rule people. According to the aging hero, Telemachus is “discerning to fulfill / This labour, by slow prudence to make mild / A rugged people. . . . / He works his work, I mine” (35–37, 43). It is the work Telemechus works that befits the home, and Ulysses admits his own inability and lack of interest regarding such efforts; however, the admittance does not imply repentance. According to Joshua Gibbs, in his essay “Why We Need Frog and Toad Now More Than Ever,” voicing one’s truth does not put him on the path towards The Truth. Similarly, in a Proverbial episode titled “Not Perfect, Just Stupid,” Gibbs contends that confession must entail repentance. “Repent, and Christ will raise you up,” he says. Ulysses, however, seeks to raise himself through adventure:

I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause and make an end, To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use. . . . for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. (18–22, 59–61)

The heroic narrative often demands that the hero travels away from home. And, in some cases, such as the American Western, the hero cannot remain in place long enough to build and keep a home. Tennyson’s Ulysses speaks to this feature. But this feature is not an absolute requirement of the hero, as demonstrated through Homer’s Odysseus. In fact, the 2017 Western film Wind River, written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, ends when the hero, who has endured a life-threatening adventure in his hometown, says to an old friend, “I’m going nowhere,” after which both the hero and the friend rest together in the friend’s backyard. It is, then, unfortunate that Ulysses’ desire leaves him dissatisfied with home. It is tragic that this hero, though equipped with the qualities of courage, intelligence, and eloquence, believes the home unfitting for “noble work” that enriches the soul.

While we should exercise prudence when it comes to being known, especially publicly known, we certainly don’t want to live or die without having shared our soul with another, which is one purpose the home should serve. Ulysses sees himself as a man of adventure, but he does not view the home as a place where adventure awaits him. Without “noble work,” what will become the hero’s soul? Home is one of the greatest adventures for human beings. Home demands that husband and wife share themselves with one another to such a degree that the two become one, “each the other’s world entire,” to borrow from Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses. To get to that place in a marriage, and sustain it, is no small task. On an episode titled “Childhood Trauma, Marriage, and Making Friends,” from the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, guest Dr. John Delony said to pursue a healthy marriage, which produces a healthy home, is a goal one will pursue his entire life. Ulysses could have set himself on that course. He would have found himself sufficiently occupied, rewarded, and known.

Mark Botts lives with his wife, Rebecca, and their three kids in West Virginia, where he is a visiting instructor of English for Bluefield State University. He teaches Bible for his local church and serves as a Strength and Conditioning coach for a Christian school. His writings can be found at Front Porch Republic, Merion West, and Voeglin View