What’s the real meaning of The Odyssey?
From our UK edition
The Roman poet Ovid summed it up in a couplet two millennia ago. Or what’s the Odyssey except a womanWooed by the suitors while her man’s away? In fact, there are over a hundred suitors who are trying to marry Odysseus’s wife. The main theme of Homer’s Odyssey is homecoming. Ovid lived a life of exile in Tomis on the Black Sea coast and despondently pines for home. The poet was banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus for what he describes as ‘a poem and a mistake' but the latter must remain ‘unmentioned’. He feels tormented by what he calls ‘a barbarous tongue that’s ignorant of Latin’. Ovid dearly misses his wife and compares her to a bearing beam that props his ruins.
