At the end of the second class on the Iliad I taught this year, one of my students – a veteran of the recent war – came up to me, his voice shaking. “Tell me,” he said, “this Homer, he must have fought in a real war!” It was really a plea: “He describes my experience better than anything I have come across; I wish I could talk to him about what is troubling me.”
I could not put him in a room with Homer but reading his work over the rest of the course did something almost as powerful for that student and for many others I teach at Shalem College in Jerusalem: helping them engage meaningfully with their experience of the war that began on October 7, 2023, in ways as relevant as any military debrief or group therapy session they have attended since.
Responses from other soldiers to articles I have published on this subject over the past two years taught me that their experience is far from unique. Reading groups for veterans built around Homer exist in many parts of the world, and the runaway success of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, released this month, suggests Homer’s pull is not limited to soldiers. What can an ancient epic offer people living in a world so different from the one for which it was written?
The Odyssey features several poets; one, the blind Demodocus, played by Travis Scott, was regarded by later generations as a stand-in for Homer himself. But poets are not the poem’s only storytellers – the hero tells stories too. At his last stop before reaching home, the island of the Phaeacians – an episode Nolan’s film cut – Odysseus recounts everything that happened to him over the previous ten years.
Another student, a paramedic in a combat unit, noticed how much space Odysseus gives to sleep in his story: he repeatedly nods off on watch and, just as often, lies awake unable to sleep at all. “During the war,” the student told me, “I kept falling asleep at critical, dangerous moments, as if my body were shutting down rather than face what my mind sensed was coming. Reading The Odyssey helped me understand what had happened to me. After I came back from combat and the insomnia did not let up, I understood that my sleep pattern was signalling that I needed to confront what I had been through. Only once I began opening up did my sleep, and my life, gradually start to heal.” Odysseus himself sleeps peacefully for the first time only after telling his own story to the Phaeacians.
Nolan builds this storytelling, and this therapy, into the film itself, giving the narration to Scott’s bard – a fragmented, contemporary voice that never quite coheres into a single narrative. Odysseus’s time with Calypso becomes another kind of therapeutic process, moving from drugs of forgetting to remembering aloud: a modern reading, but one the poem itself already anticipates in its understanding of the healing power of telling one’s own story.
One of the hardest parts of processing a war is reckoning with the harm soldiers have themselves inflicted. This is not a moral judgment: killing in the context of a just war is not murder but it still exacts a moral and psychological cost, and those who have fought must find a way to live with what circumstances compelled them to do.
The second half of The Odyssey is devoted to the week between Odysseus’s landing on Ithaca and his reunion with his home and wife. Three of those days are given to an unusually long encounter: his stay in the hut of Eumaeus, the swineherd. Nolan keeps Eumaeus but drops the long conversations the two men have before reaching the palace.
I began teaching The Odyssey a decade before October 7, and for years my students and I puzzled over why Homer gives this meeting so much space – a puzzle sharpened by the fact that Odysseus goes out of his way to present himself in the worst light, as an adventurer who abandoned his family for war and glory. We usually explained this as a need to recruit allies: Eumaeus, one of the few still loyal to him, is a man who avoids conflict and longs for peace, and perhaps Odysseus was working to stoke a fighting spirit in him.
When we reached this part of the story in the first year of the war, one student – a soldier in a special unit who lives near the Gaza border – found a direct connection to his own story. He too had been called up on October 7, fought the terrorists who attacked Israeli communities and treated the wounded. Three days later, on a short leave home, he drove to the entrance of his community and began turning towards his own house – and found that he could not do it. Instead, he drove to the home of a mentor from his youth. He walked in like a storm; his mentor offered him a seat, but he would not sit. “I was doing 120 kilometres an hour,” he told me. He talked for almost three hours, describing the horrors he had witnessed and the terrible things the war had required of him. When he finished, he felt cleansed – and only then drove home to see his parents.
That story gave the Eumaeus scene an entirely different meaning for us. Odysseus is not there to win the shepherd over; he is there to face his own capacity for evil and process what he has lived through. One of the hardest things about soldiers’ trauma, my students have told me, is that they no longer recognise themselves. Meeting someone willing simply to listen helps them reweave their own stories, knitting jarring new fragments into something coherent again.
Experience – not only the experience of war – needs words, and it needs shape. Three thousand years after they were composed, the Iliad and The Odyssey still seem able to give their readers both.
Professor Ido Hevroni (@IdoHevroni) is the chair of the David and Judith Lobel Core Curriculum at Shalem College in Jerusalem. He has been teaching The Iliad and The Odyssey since the institution’s opening in 2013 and is writing a book about teaching Homer in wartime
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