The Clinical Odyssey: Odysseus's Apologoi and Narrative Therapy

When Alkinoos elicits Odysseus’s narrative of his trials at the end of Odyssey 8, he asks for a tale of the Trojan War, a fate “the gods fashioned, a ruin they allotted to men to become a song for us and later generations” (8.577–80).1 The attitude implicit in the tale he requests countermands Zeus’s opening lament in the epic that men blame the gods for their fate but are themselves responsible for suffering worse than they deserve thanks to their own recklessness (atasthalia).2 Odysseus echoes Alkinoos in promising to tell “the many pains which the Ouranian gods have given me” (κήδἐ ἐπεί μοι πολλὰ δόσαν θεοὶ Οὐρανίωνες, 9.15). But the story he tells navigates in surprising ways between the sentiments