hey, I had an idea where Odysseus did actually die at sea and his ghost dragged itself back to Ithaka but Mr Polytropos "Lies like he breathes" Odysseus managed to convince himself he was still alive. but he's dead and there's just a while where his ghost is wandering Ithaka steadily getting worse at pretending to be alive while Penelope and Telemachus are trying to avoid the realization they are literally living in a haunted house
you! you get it!!! the haunted house of godlike odysseus!!!!!! in my monster paper right now (the one underlaid by my insistence that the odyssey is a portal fantasy) i talk about how a lot of odysseus’s voyages between worlds are described as akin to death-- there’s the storm off cape maleia that sweeps him from normal-real-mediterranean into fantasy-supernatural-mediterrean, but mostly i focused on his transition from ogygia to scheria, where its very clear that he’s on the verge of death and does actually stop breathing for a minute there, and then also his transition from scheria to ithaca, which takes place while he experiences “a sleep most nearly resembling death” (ὕπνος θανάτῳ ἄγχιστα ἐοικώς). and then of course when he and his men return from the nekyia circe calls them “twice dying where other mortal men die but once” (δισθανέες, ὅτε τ᾽ ἄλλοι ἅπαξ θνῄσκουσ᾽ ἄνθρωποι).
anyway odysseus dies between ogygia and scheria (and i’ve got Many Pages on how scheria is an underworld and the phaeacians are akin to gods and ghosts, ie the two states of deathlessness, the two beings that never die) and he dies again between scheria and ithaca. the gods bring him back to ithaca but he is not as alive as he was when he left. and fundamentally odysseus’s departure from ogygia is about him choosing to be human, which is to say he chooses to (eventually) die. odysseus’s death hangs over him from the time he leaves the underworld. he’s waiting for that second death that circe mentioned, the one all his men experience later in book 12, but he has to live with it following his every step, close as a shadow. he has a chance to escape the death tiresias gave him but he chooses to be human and mortal and die (and be remembered, since death is the condition of kleos). i do think odysseus wants to die. he can’t be a hero without a death. that’s why he turns down calypso. he makes the same choice as achilles, barters death for glory, and doesn’t listen when achilles tells him the exchange rate is too steep.
i also saw this post about what pride and prejudice and zombies could have been yesterday and i do firmly believe that penelope and telemachus would accept an undead odysseus and join him in insisting to all the other ithacans that look odysseus is back, he’s perfectly fine and totally 100% alive, he just needs to go inside right now and won’t be receiving visitors and perhaps it would be best if you all conduct your business with him through telemachus, but in any case penelope is definitely still married to this very much still-alive odysseus so she can’t marry any of you, sorry. that’s also kind of what i’ve been thinking about with the idea that this man who turns up isn’t odysseus, he’s just some cretan, and penelope and telemachus just give up and accept him as the realest odysseus they’re going to get. the house has been haunted for twenty years. it’s not much of a change to finally acknowledge the ghost.
