A poem full of displaced people
Odysseus is only the most conspicuous. The Odyssey is populated by people who are not where they came from, and it notices all of them.
Eumaeus was stolen as a child from an island where his father was king and sold into slavery. The Phoenician woman who took him had herself been kidnapped by pirates. Eurycleia was bought. The twelve women in the household were acquired somehow, and the poem does not say how. Theoclymenus is a fugitive seer who has killed a man and needs passage. The suitors' families face the choice at the end between staying and feud.
And Odysseus's false life stories — the Cretan tales he tells four times — are all stories of displacement: a bastard son, a raider, a captive in Egypt, a man passed from hand to hand. He invents, over and over, a life like the ones around him.
Displacement as the ordinary condition
The poem's world assumes movement, and mostly involuntary movement. Piracy is a recognised activity — Nestor asks Telemachus, politely, whether he is a trader or a pirate, and it is not an insult. Slavery supplies households. Ships are lost. The sea is the medium of exchange and the mechanism of ruin.
Against that background the oikos is not a sentimental attachment. It is the only thing that makes a person more than a body available for sale, which is why Eumaeus can say that Zeus takes away half a man's worth on the day he becomes a slave, and why getting home is worth refusing immortality for.
What return does not undo
The poem is precise that coming back does not reverse having been away.
Odysseus arrives with nothing left of what he took: twelve ships gone, every companion dead. He arrives asleep and does not recognise the place. He then spends eleven books unable to be known, living in his own house as a beggar, being kicked and struck by men eating his property.
When he is finally recognised, he tells his wife that there is more travelling to come — inland, with an oar, until he meets people who do not know the sea.
The homecoming is real and it is not a restoration of the status quo ante. Twenty years happened.
The exile who cannot return
The poem's counter-figures are the ones for whom return is closed. Agamemnon returned and was murdered. Achilles is dead and says he would rather be a landless labourer among the living. Elpenor died on Circe's roof and asks only for a grave with an oar planted on it, so that someone will know he was there.
Elpenor is the poem's smallest and clearest statement on the subject: a man with no achievements at all, whose entire request is not to be unmarked.
The Greek terms
Nostos, the return; nostimon ēmar, the day of homecoming, which characters speak of as a thing that can be taken away from them. Xenos, the stranger — and the guest, and the host. Phugē, flight.
Later interpretation
The Odyssey has been read persistently in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a poem about veterans and about refugees, and both readings find real purchase: the poem is unusually attentive to what displacement does to people, and unusually unwilling to promise that arrival repairs it. The risk in such readings is anachronism — the poem has no concept of trauma and no concept of the refugee as a legal category — and the discipline is to say what the text does and does not contain.