The sea itself, on which Odysseus and his men are forced to travel, is a treacherously alien element, even under the best of circumstances. And Odysseus is faced with the worst of circumstances: He has made an implacable enemy of Poseidon, because of yet another inimical Other, Polyphemus, the cyclops who happens to be Poseidon’s son. At first Polyphemus seems, in his pastoral way of life, sufficiently human—unlike, say, the ravenous six-headed monster Scylla or her man-slurping next-door neighbor, Charybdis—that Odysseus dares to approach the one-eyed giant as a fellow being.

He and his men, Odysseus explains to Polyphemus, are not piratical outlaws but Greeks who fought victoriously under the glorious Agamemnon. He ends on a note of supplication. He appeals to the code the Greeks called xenia, from their word for “stranger,” which regulated how guests and hosts, especially when unknown to each other, ought to behave—an exaggerated etiquette meant to preempt the violence coiled within Other-anxiety:

Now we beg you,

here at your knees, to grant a gift, as is

the norm for hosts and guests. Please sir, my lord:

respect the gods. We are your suppliants,

and Zeus is on our side, since he takes care

of visitors, guest-friends, and those in need.

Polyphemus explodes in contempt at Odysseus’s well-crafted words, declaring himself outside all norms that guide men and gods: “I do the bidding of my own heart.” And then he snatches up two of Odysseus’s men and makes a quick and gory meal of them. Such wantonness untouched by pity could not be a starker expression of an unbridgeable gulf.

Many of Odysseus’s encounters are more subtly seductive, mingling exquisite pleasure with duplicity—on both sides. He’s the lover of both the sorceress Circe and the nymph Calypso, who forces him to stay even after he’s grown tired of her. But his erotic entanglement with these rare beauties never melts the frost of strangeness between them. Neither female has—neither can have—Odysseus’s welfare in mind, because of an essential Otherness that prevents them from understanding, much less caring about, the man they use for their own ends.

And so we come to the most unsettling encounters Odysseus must navigate: with the familiar, the familial, Other. Even when a warrior returns to the bosom of his family, his safety is by no means assured. What looks like intimacy may turn into enmity. A foe may await in disguise, ready to attack when the most seasoned of soldiers is unarmed and unsuspecting. This is the message that the shade of Agamemnon imparts to Odysseus when he ventures into Hades to ask for guidance on getting home.

Odysseus learns that Agamemnon, at his own homecoming, died at the hands of his wife and her lover. Yes, Odysseus commiserates, disaster has again and again been visited on the house of Atreus (Agamemnon’s father) by the women imported into the family. After all, Helen, Agamemnon’s sister-in-law, was the one who provoked the whole bleeding mess of the war and its aftermath. Agamemnon suggests that Odysseus is drawing too narrow a conclusion in confining the problem to Agamemnon’s family. The truth is more general:

At once he answered,

So you must never treat your wife too well.

Do not let her know everything you know.

Agamemnon reassures Odysseus that his wife, Penelope, will not kill him, but only because she is too sensible. Odysseus must not assume that Penelope—or any woman a man brings into his family—has his interests at heart. A few lines later, Agamemnon delivers his implacable conclusion: “There is no trusting women any longer.” Odysseus’s own son, Telemachus—a baby when his father left for war 20 years earlier—strives to assert his manliness in part by silencing women, his patient mother in particular. “Go in and do your work,” he tells Penelope:

Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves

to do their chores as well. It is for men

to talk, especially me. I am the master.

By contrast, Odysseus refuses to renounce the possibility that Penelope will prove to be “somebody like-minded,” as he puts it to the Phaeacian princess in describing the ideal marriage:

For nothing could be better than when two

live in one house, their minds in harmony,

husband and wife. Their enemies are jealous,

their friends delighted, and they have great honor.

Honor represents the sine qua non of the hero. Conniving suitors can’t sabotage Odysseus’s hope that Penelope, a young bride when he left her, has matured into just such a soul mate. That hope is what inspires him to spurn Calypso’s offer of immortality—an extraordinary decision, all the more so given his glimpse of the everlasting bleakness of Hades that awaits.