Odyssey as Wisdom Literature

Proclussaid of the Odyssey, “Many are the wanderings and circlings of the soul: one among imaginings, one in opinions and one before these in understanding. But only the life according to NOUS has stability and this is the mystical harbor of the soul to which, on the one hand, the poem leads Odysseus through the great wandering of his life, and to which we too shall draw ourselves up, if we would reach salvation.” This fancy has little to do with Homer, yet it’s certainly possible, and plausible, to read the Odyssey as wisdom literature. It’s the cunning Odysseus, after all, not the powerful Achilles, who wins the glory of the defeat of Troy, and Odysseus as well who is able to crown his victory with a safe return to Ithaca. The Odyssey tells us that wisdom is the only thing, that the wise man is better than the man who captures a city. But the wisdom that Homer can offer only goes so far: Odysseus exercises all the wit he can muster in order to return to a human world, which is necessarily also a return to mortality – not, as the Neoplatonists would have it, an elevation to immortality.