Crying as an expression of deep sadness is common throughout The Odyssey for heroes, and Odysseus himself cries on several occasions. There is no ‘boys don’t cry’ in Homeric epics. In fact, it’s more a case of ‘heroes do cry’.
Odysseus isn’t the only one to openly express his emotions. Earlier in the poem we are told that Menelaus, King of Sparta, recalls the hardships of the war and starts to weep. Helen, his famously beautiful wife, drugs their wine with a narcotic called nepenthe (it quite literally means ‘no suffering’); you get the feeling Helen has seen the crying on many occasions before, and is only too aware that many of those in the room will blame her for their suffering.
The drug is immensely powerful:
Then the child of Zeus,
Helen, decided she would mix the wine
with drugs to take all the pain and rage away, to bring forgetfulness of every evil.
‘Whoever drinks this mixture from the bowl will shed no tears that day, not even if
her mother or her father die, nor even if soldiers kill her brother or her darling
son with bronze spears before her very eyes.’
Is this a good thing? To be so far removed from your pain and rage that you forget everything? That even if those you loved most were killed, you would feel nothing? We certainly do not want the pain, but equally, how many of us would really not have had the love that precedes the loss? Would you choose a life without pain if it meant choosing a life without love? Perhaps, sometimes, yes. Or perhaps you just need some nepenthe. But what happens when nepenthe is a way of life? What happens when you can never show your feelings? What happens when you can never acknowledge vulnerability? What is your version of nepenthe, the thing that blunts the feelings? Drugs, wine, food, social media, zoning out, shutting down? We all have one, and occasionally they are fine, but employ them too frequently at your peril. Your emotional pain tells you something about what matters to you.
Odysseus does not hide his anguish or pretend that he is content in paradise with a beautiful lover sea nymph Capes. He cries on the shore, longing for home and his wife. This is not weakness, nor an inability to cope, but a foundation of genuine strength. He refuses to numb himself – he has no nepenthe anyway – to what he longs for or to convince himself that his desires don’t matter. He cries because he knows what matters – his wife, his son, his family, his kingdom, his home – and he has none of it.
This is a man who has witnessed the horrors of war, heard the screams of his comrades begging him to save them and is now reduced to tears by homesickness. To our modern eyes, trained to see emotional control as strength, this might look like failure. But Homer shows us that there is nothing more courageous than refusing to lie to yourself about what you feel.
What makes this vulnerability truly powerful is how Odysseus treats himself in his pain. Unlike a modern counterpart, he does not berate himself for his longing or shame himself for his inability to move on and be grateful. There is no harsh internal voice telling him to toughen up, be a man and accept what looks like an enviable life. Instead, he grieves as naturally as he breathes, recognizing that his longing needs an acknowledgement. And all the while he makes room for his sadness, he builds his capacity to tackle what awaits him.
Yet ten years of a harrowing war and another ten years of displacement, have carved deep grooves of mistrust into this man. Traumatic events are wont to disrupt the trust human beings have in other people, themselves and the world. It is safer not to trust than to risk, once more, the excruciating pain of loss. When [sea nymph] Calypso finally offers to help him leave, allowing him to build a raft, Odysseus’ response reveals just how falteringly trust comes after you have been hurt too many times. ‘Goddess,’ he tells her, letting his words fly out at her ‘you have some other scheme in mind, not my safe passage . . . No, goddess, I will not get on a raft, unless you swear to me a mighty oath you are not planning yet more pain for me.’
Even in his desperation to escape, he cannot simply accept her offer. Bitter experience has told him that he cannot really know who to trust any more. There are few more isolated places for the psyche of a human being. A life without trust is a life without connection to another person, the very definition of what it is to feel alone. He may no longer wear his warrior’s armour, but his wariness of being deceived, betrayed and hurt are every bit as strong as any bronze breastplate. He will not give that up easily. Protecting his heart is the one thing he still has control over.
We see this everywhere in our own world. After a relationship ends, where there have been lies and dissembling, we question every new partner’s motives. After a workplace betrayal, we check our colleagues’ words for hidden meanings. After a traumatic event, the prospect of opening up ourselves to desperately needed help can feel impossibly risky. Easier not to try or to hope than to be hurt again.
The path forward requires respecting that caution, for it often comes from a place of protection, while slowly and carefully learning to trust again. As the story progresses, we see how Odysseus slowly reveals his true identity to those he has ascertained he can trust, and that revelation of ‘true self’ is a key theme in The Odyssey. He does not blurt out who he is to all and sundry. He watches and waits, and chooses his moment with precision. He fiercely protects his inner core revealing his identity and vulnerability gradually, unpeeling them like the layers of an onion, once he can trust again. For some people, because of some traumas that are so destructive in nature, trust is the hardest thing to regain.
In our own lives, we can mistake invulnerability for strength. We suppress or push away emotions, telling ourselves to be grateful for what we have rather than acknowledging what we truly need. Vulnerability, an admission of our human frailties, does not necessarily exclude or negate grit, resilience and strength, rather they underpin it. Odysseus may well be grateful for the last seven years of his life on a stunning island paradise with an immortal goddess who never ceases to desire him, but it’s not what he truly needs. What he needs is to find a way back to who he really is and to find his way home. That admission, and the acknowledgement of his pain, his vulnerability, is grist to his resilience mill.
This is what The Odyssey reveals to us about real strength: it doesn’t come from emotional numbness or pretending we don’t need what we need. It comes from the courage to feel fully, to acknowledge our suffering with compassion rather than judgement, and so take responsibility ourselves for slowly rebuilding our capacity for connection. Vulnerability is the prerequisite for understanding who you really are, what you really want and what you can really give to others.
The hero’s journey home, whether to Ithaca or to our authentic selves, always leads through the territory of acknowledged pain. It is only by being radically honest with ourselves and treating our struggles with kindness, that we can hope to find a way back to what makes us whole.
