With Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in cinemas, author and former intelligence officer Andy Owen examines current geopolitics through the lens of Homer’s epic. Owen argues that honor is still a vital part of modern war, and that ignoring this psychological aspect may cause ongoing wars around the world to continue longer than they might otherwise need to. Owen argues, only by embracing uncertainty, being malleable, and by learning to live with those we fiercely disagree with, can we meet the Homeric challenges of the modern world.

Classicist Daniel Mendelsohn claims the Odyssey is “haunted by a feeling that the old world order has come to an end, and now we’re just on our own, making our way as best we can.” Inside the penultimacy of the collapse of the rules-based international order, it is possible to sense the ghostly echoes of the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, of palace cultures and warrior kings Homer was looking back on in his epics. The ancient poem and its hero Odysseus can provide timely lessons for us to navigate our fragmenting world.

Aristotle describes the plot of Homer’s Odyssey accordingly: “A certain man has been abroad many years; he is alone, and the god Poseidon keeps a hostile eye on him. At home the situation is that suitors for his wife’s hand are draining his resources and plotting to kill his son. Then, after suffering storm and shipwreck, he comes home, makes himself known, attacks the suitors: he survives, and they are destroyed.” There is much more to the sweeping, twisting and turning epic. Its layers reflect the legacy of a long oral tradition that involved singers and storytellers who developed the story in multiple different locations across the Greek-speaking world. It is a tale of woven narratives; a rich tapestry that in turn became a loom for others to weave their stories from, stitching together the fabric of a heroic Roman epic, quest narratives, a domestic comedy, a modernist voyage into the subconscious of twentieth-century Dubliners, anti-colonial narratives, romance, revenge, Bildungsroman and biography. Director Christopher Nolan’s film version will provide a new reading.

In Emily Wilson’s translation she uses “complicated” for the Greek polytropos that introduces Odysseus (others have used man of many ways” or “many twists and turns,” “cunning,” and “resourceful”). Wilson landed on “complicated” for a combination of syntactical and semantical reasons, including liking the concept of complexity as a positive quality in the world of the poem. Wilson isn’t alone in identifying the benefit of complexity. There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Philosopher Isaiah Berlin uses this line to divide thinkers into “Hedgehogs” and “Foxes.” Hedgehogs relate everything to a single central vision, system or universal principle, through which all experience is understood. They include Plato, Hegel, and Dostoevsky. Foxes pursue many ends, often unrelated, even contradictory, seizing the essence of a wide variety of experiences without trying to fit them into any single overarching scheme. Berlin’s foxes include Shakespeare, Aristotle, and Tolstoy, whom he saw as a tragic genius of plural perceptions who longed for a single, unifying truth about history. By nature a fox, Tolstoy believed in being a hedgehog. Berlin did not consider the fictional characters, but although he has a singular goal of return, the many-sided, complicated Odysseus is the archetypal fox.

Odysseus’ fox-like nature allows him to navigate a changing world. He will fight like a warrior when his enemy is in plain view and the odds are in his favor, yet quickly adapt, build alliances and influence, letting his words become his weapons when they are not, and the situation is uncertain. He is a calculated risk-taker who displays great adaptability, solving problems and innovating solutions to transform his environment for survival, with the wooden horse at Troy and by building the raft on which he sets sail from the nymph Calypso’s island. He is able to transform himself into multiple guises and roles depending on the environment and the needs and desires of those he meets. To cope with the arrival of AI, historian Yuval Noah Harari, warning against “any attempt to focus on a narrow set of skills,” highlights the need for an Odysseus-like mix of intellectual skills, social skills and motor skills: “of the brain, of the heart and of the hands.” Underpinning these characteristics is Odysseus’ ability to be “much-enduring,” ploughing on through the unharvestable sea. Odysseus claims, “And if a god will wreck me yet again on the wine-dark sea / I can bear that too, with a spirit tempered to endure.” It is not the Achillean blaze of glory but the quieter, harder thing: to keep going. Odyssean endurance is heroic, but he is a complicated hero, equally capable of violence, deceit, love and loyalty.

Despite his resilience, Odysseus does suffer. He survives because throughout his odyssey he remains lashed to the memory of home. It is his connections that, whenever the clouds clear, are his Polaris, showing him the direction to keep moving. The wandering characters in the Odyssey have a quality of “embeddedness” or “rootedness.” Most are situated within their family tree from the moment of introduction (“father of,” “daughter of”). This also comes from social networks of kith as well as kin, forged in war and adventure. At the centre of Odysseus’ network is Penelope. Whilst revered for her loyalty, it’s her fierce intelligence and resilience, through which she tries to carve out agency in a world where women have little, that makes her a match for Odysseus. They have a homophrosyne or like-mindedness, still recognizable after the twenty years he is away. When he returns, Penelope tests him with the secret of the bed he built around a living olive tree. It is shared, private knowledge and a recognition of their homophrosyne that reveals him to her. It is then, rather than when he sets foot on the sands of Ithaca, that he is really home. We all build our own olive-tree beds that provide the roots of our relationships; the stories, shared moments we experience together, those little things only we know about each other that allow us to return to each other.

The Odyssey is not only a personal story of Odysseus’ return. As writer Adam Nicolson states, “Every aspect of it is grand metaphor.” The Odyssey explores the instability of our individual consciousness, but the metaphor scales to that of the nation’s. And, if as Mendelsohn claims, now we’re just individuals on our own, with the breaking of alliances and fragmenting of systems based on assumed shared values, states are equally lonesome.

Each era sees its own crisis reflected back. In 1943, during the Nazi occupation of Greece, a radio dramatization of the final books of the Odyssey was broadcast, highlighting the painful parallel between the suitors occupying Odysseus’s palace and the Nazis occupying Greece. Today we can see an isolated Odysseus separated from the grand Greek alliance that had fought at Troy, adrift at the end of an era, as analogous to states adrift in the fragmenting international order that was born from the ashes of the war against the Nazis.

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The multimatrixed world, where bellicose modern “warrior kings” launch wars to increase their status, is closer to Bronze Age palace culture than Kant’s utopia.

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Historian Anton Jäger describes a state of “hyperpolitics” within nations, contrasting with a previous age of mass politics. Mass politics belonged to a highly socialized and politicized society, structured by parties, unions, and movements with clear social bases and ideologies. Hyperpolitics emerged in the 2010s as a paradoxical combination of high political attention and collapsing institutional participation and hyper-individualization. Documentarian Adam Curtis traces hyper-individualism back to the policies of Margaret Thatcher, who stated, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.”

Thatcher’s individualism, a synthesis of Methodist moral duty and Hayekian free-market economics, sought to liberate the individual from the state to foster self-reliance and enterprise. At the same time, the separating of economics from politics by handing power to unaccountable markets, banks and multinationals started under Thatcher before accelerating under Tony Blair. What are described by writer Will Self as old intermediary structures: “parties, unions, churches, local associations, civic corporations in the Hegelian sense [occupational-based associations that bridge the gap between individual self-interest and the universal good of the state]” were hollowed out to empty shells. Parties once offered members an interpretive framework that organized experience and made collective action imaginable. We are now left with an executive authority that “floats free from lived social embeddedness while still attempting to simulate it theatrically.”

The forces of deindustrialization and globalization that created a new information economy also liberated individuals from their communities, driving internal migration to find jobs and to complete tertiary education to qualify for those jobs, increasing the numbers living apart from their extended family. Curtis argues that individualism dismantled collective power, leaving modern citizens isolated and alone.

Jäger proposes a hyperpolitical metaphor: the 1957 wreck of the Pamir. Before setting sail, to save time, four thousand tonnes of grain were poured loose rather than stowed in sacks. A storm hit. The Pamir should have been able to withstand such a storm, but the loose cargo shifted erratically, capsizing it. Collapsing institutional participation has caused us to lose our sacks. When societies enter crises, atomization amplifies volatility. This is inflated by the short-term sentiment, speculation, and algorithmic exaggeration of deregulated economies.

Meanwhile, citizens increasingly inhabit systems of bureaucracy and information too complex for ordinary human intuition to grasp. Many are asking who is really in control? Skeptical of finding truth and lacking the fatalism of Homer’s Greeks, some become set adrift on conspiracies. To escape ennui, others seek the certainty and excitement of political or religious radicalism. Isolated others, not feeling part of a local community, seek belonging in exclusionary ideologies. The majority feel “politically homeless.” Citizens increasingly find temporary refuge in virtual worlds and domains of disinformation, in which you can not only be anonymous, but you can be from anywhere and nowhere, working remotely and living nomadically. This forces societies to focus energy and capital on nation-building, often at the cost of the nation’s standing internationally, but as Self observes of the British state, Western countries “can still generate procedures” but “can no longer generate myth.” We have dismantled our stories not just of war and adventure, but of what we have built together too, that bind the social networks of kith and kin. Ideological disorientation prevails: debate erupts over one issue today, another tomorrow.

The Pamir offers an analogy for the relationships between states as well as within them. President Trump is accelerating a longer process of unraveling the components of the old order and the alliances that built them. The system of international laws, principles, institutions, frameworks, and alliances built after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people, were the sacks that separated the grain. Trumpism and the collapse of this system are accelerating us towards a world where brute force matters more than international law, but like their citizens, states inhabit geopolitical systems too complex for their leaders and institutions to grasp, and force rarely has the consequences intended. Ideological disorientation prevails: conflict erupts over one issue today, another tomorrow.

The post-1945 order was kept in place by the threat of American violence and economic sanction, and the promise of access to wealth generating free markets, rather than a shared sense of morality or justice (there are over 800 overseas US military bases. Turkey and the UK follow with approximately a hundred each, Turkey’s in its immediate vicinity, the UK’s across the shadow of ex-empire). This was more obvious from the Global South, who saw Western countries punish weaker states for breaking the rules they themselves regularly broke. However, most states concluded that they would maximize outcomes by playing by the rules. If the threat is reduced and the promise diminished, as wars and tariffs damage the global economy, more states will see less reason to abide by international law, seeing it as irrelevant to a pragmatic foreign policy.

We are moving into a “multimatrixed world”, where states attempt to resist the orbit of regional powers in global competition, motivated by survival and mutual benefit rather than ideology, trying to hedge rather than having to choose sides, forming complex and oft contradictory matrices of alliances across trade, security, energy and cultural communality. It is a system vulnerable to rapid change. Like Odysseus, states are adrift on turbulent seas at the mercy of capricious higher powers. Like the Pamir, they are prone to sudden listing.

The post-1945 international order created a world vastly different from Homer’s. Bronze Age Greece was an emptier world, with fewer dependencies and without weapons that could cause global catastrophe. Yet there were still important commonalities with the multimatrixed world we are entering.

Immanuel Kant assumed that as states became more republican, economically interdependent, and bound by international law, the force of moral progress would pull them together to form a peaceful federation. The UN Charter was based on the aspirational assumption that there are universal values that all cultures would agree to. Encoding the verdicts from the Nuremberg Trials, it prohibited states from using force against the territorial integrity or independence of other states, and made leaders criminally accountable for launching aggressive wars. Whilst a thinner moral floor than Kant envisaged, contemporary human-rights theorists argue that prohibitions on genocide, slavery, torture, censorship and aggressive war are not Western impositions but principles that all moral and religious traditions recognize. Yet, as Western power retreats, it is becoming clear that in many parts of the world Western concepts of universal human rights were never universal, but culturally and religiously contingent concepts.

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The world that Homer describes does not assume progress towards a more homogeneous, peaceful community, nor does it recognize the universality of many of the values the post-1945 frameworks do. The multimatrixed world, where bellicose modern “warrior kings” launch wars to increase their status, is closer to Bronze Age palace culture than Kant’s utopia. Yet, the Odyssey also shows us a way we can minimize violence and war. 

In Homer’s world, standing rested on honor and observance of xenia (guest‑friendship). Xenia required a host to provide food, shelter, and protection before asking a stranger’s name or origins, under the divine authority of Zeus Xenios. Homer treats hospitality as a primary marker of civilization, and its violation as a cosmic rupture. Paris abuses his host’s hospitality by taking Helen, triggering the Trojan War. In Ithaca, the suitors’ prolonged exploitation of Odysseus’s household is a systematic breach of xenia. Before approaching the island of the Cyclopes, Odysseus must find out whether the inhabitants are people who welcome strangers or “lawless aggressors.”

Xenia was a shared code of conduct that created cross-cultural bonds, making travel possible in a world of piracy, cattle raiding, and anarchic competition between clans. It was a mechanism by which unrelated elite families met as equals without resorting to war and built alliances in a world with no central authority imposing law and order. These bonds could prevent or mitigate conflicts. In the Iliad, when the Greek Diomedes and the Trojan ally Glaucus realize their grandfathers were guest-friends, they stop fighting and exchange armor to honor the ancestral bond. The development of xenia was driven by the practical necessity of survival in a fragmented, dangerous landscape. However, it developed beyond survival, becoming a sophisticated institution that facilitated interstate diplomacy, economic exchange, and the consolidation of aristocratic power. It still allowed individuals and groups to prioritize their own interests above that of strangers, but out-group members were to be treated with respect and generosity; failure invited dishonor.

Xenia helps root power in reciprocal social relationships, communal obligations, networks of exchange, feasting, and mutual dependence. The Homeric elite, whilst far from democratic, are “embedded” in martial and social relations. As well as fighting at the head of their armies, they were required to convert wealth and status into social capital through generosity and service. The leader’s role as the host demonstrated his ability to provide for his people. The feast functions throughout the Odyssey as a tool for conflict resolution and community consensus-building. When deciding whether to assist Odysseus, Phaeacian king Alcinous convenes an assembly, ensuring that the decision is communal (at least among the elite). For the Phaeacians, xenia is a public activity involving feasting, games, and collective gift-giving. Alcinous’ authority relies on coordinating the collective resources of the community rather than draining them.

Xenia was based on practicalities, not values; it did not insist on a shared ethical view. It is the thinnest of ground, but it can provide foundations to start building up from. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues for a bottom-up, or fractal, cosmopolitanism grounded in everyday practices of coexistence. The Odyssey itself is made up of fractals; patterns repeating within themselves, built up from embedded mirroring stories. At the Phaeacian court, a bard sings about Odysseus while he listens and weeps, before he reveals himself and takes over as narrator with a “singer’s skill”, authoring his own myth inside the larger poem. When in disguise, his invented cover stories include tales of shipwrecks and odysseys that echo the path of his real travels.

For Appiah, international stability scales from the same repeated, everyday accommodations among strangers—shared practices more than shared principles—into a wider pattern of coexistence without imposed central design. It rests on two commitments: universal concern for others (diminishing obligations extend beyond kin to community, nation and all) and respect for difference that recognizes multiple valid ways of living. Stability does not require a universal worldview; just each worldview, on its own terms, generating support for the shared rules. Appiah claims, “we can agree about what to do in most cases, without agreeing what is right.” Through conversations, grounded in the realities of the time and place, we can reach a way of coexisting without full consensus, moving past binary tribalism.

Appiah talks of modus vivendi: a way of living together, without pretending to agree on values and fully resolving underlying conflicts. Philosopher John Gray also uses the concept, rejecting projects of liberal universalism and institutions that attempt to engineer agreement on contested values, noting that “conflicts of values are not technically soluble problems.” Even the most self-reliant and enterprising citizens within states, and states within the multimatrixed world, are social entities, inextricably side-by-side. Communities extend upwards from family, extended families, clans and nations, to global religions, political movements, and supra-state geographical identities. Value-laden relations between and within communities can be both fractal and contradictory, and are in constant conversation, not to convert but to find common ground.

The embedded universalizing cultures and technocratic processes of some of today’s supranational organisations mean they are beyond top-down reform, no longer fit for purpose. The challenge is to design new institutions that will be often messy and historically contingent, in which incompatible communities can live together tolerably well, and our worst excesses are limited but never fully eradicated. Through these institutions we need to build new networks of alliances, which may begin between two states on one issue—trade, technology, security or energy—and build up.

Values will still clash, and violence will still occur. A great challenge facing a multimatrixed world is how to break the cycles of violence when conversation fails. Poet Ann Carson asks and answers, “Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” This grief that provides fuel to rage is not just over the victims of violence, but over injustices, indignities and loss of face. Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors (and jarringly of the women slaves) functions as the restoration of a violated order. When the relatives of the suitors seek revenge, Athena—appearing as the elder Mentor—mediates to break the cycle of killing, grief, rage and more killing with the threat of Zeus’s wrath. Odysseus “gladly obeys,” taking the honorable exit; even warriors in honor cultures know the cycles must end before they destroy all involved. Peace is underwritten by divine force.

We have global mechanisms of diplomacy and arbitration, but ultimately peace is underwritten by military power, with a hegemonic US often fulfilling this role. Under America First doctrine, there is no longer a supreme deity; we must now rely on the beneficence of a pantheon of lesser gods.

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But the threat of violence alone does not end the cycle. There is negative peace, which sees violence cease, but underlying tensions remain, and positive peace, which is not a transactional process of determining lines on a map or the transfer of resources, but recognizes underlying grievances. To break cycles of violence, to dissipate rage, justice must be attempted.

It is not distributive justice (the fair distribution of resources) or retributive justice (proportionate punishment of rights violations). It is justice that restores a moral equilibrium of dignity and honor. Several countries have experimented with restorative justice: an approach that, instead of solely punishing the offender for depersonalized crimes against “the people” in a state courtroom, brings together the victims and those responsible to discuss the impact of the incident on them. It gives victims a voice and a say in the consequences, allowing them to reclaim honor. Truth and Reconciliation committees in South Africa, Argentina and Northern Ireland had similar victim-centric philosophies. They contrast with cases brought to the Hague against “humanity,” thousands of miles from where the crimes were committed and the victims were dishonoured.

This is not to advocate for an international system based on honor. Honor-based thinking can lead to escalating feuds between individuals and entire communities. Honor groups have norms for determining how honor is allocated, but place few restrictions on the moral content of these norms. They can promote nationalism, militarism and ethnic cleansing. But we need to recognize, as Homer did, that a restoration of honor is vital to ending conflict (the Iliad is the tale of the cycle of violence caused by Achilles’ rage from loss of face, then grief, to its resolution). Germany’s loss of face at Versailles led to the most destructive war in human history. Russia’s loss of face, from the collapse of the USSR and expansion of NATO, led in part to the illegal invasion of Ukraine. We must understand that honor is a major motivator of violence in modern times, as it was in Homer’s.

States must expand their diplomatic corps, not with inexperienced cronies, but with those who understand the psychology of honor, and understand the fear and loss of face our actions can create and the need to provide honorable exits when this happens. Those who recognize that our cognitive limits and the persistence of reasonable moral disagreement will undercut projects to settle global ethics through top-down moral convergence and instead build new codes of interaction in the complex matrices of the new geopolitics from the ground up. Those who will resist moralising and attempting to convert others to their worldview. Those who can coordinate the collective action of the lesser gods to provide the threat of deterrence when cycles of violence spiral.

When attempting this, diplomats should keep in mind the Odyssey’s twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus must navigate a narrow strait guarded by six-headed Scylla perched on a high cliff who snatches sailors from passing ships, and Charybdis, a vast whirlpool that swallows the sea three times a day, destroying any vessel that drifts too close. In the strait, to avoid one is to drift toward the other. In a multimatrixed world where there is increasing competition, states are being forced into the Homeric strait, with no equidistant route through the middle. Circe advises Odysseus to hug Scylla’s cliff and lose six men rather than risk the whole ship to Charybdis. The danger is, through wishful thinking and historical bias, not recognizing you are in the Homeric strait and sailing unknowingly towards what could be the greater evil, rather than recognising your situation and sailing instead towards the known lesser evil.

Odysseus survived the strait and the other perils of his odyssey. States can survive our fragmenting world through adopting his adaptability and resiliency, avoiding over-reliance on one partner, diversifying economies, leveraging technologies to move quickly during change, and avoiding a singular approach to national security. Berlin is not the only one to co-opt Archilochus’ fragments. Evolutionary biologists refer to hyper-specialist species as “hedgehog species”: creatures that evolved to do one highly specific thing perfectly. They are most at risk at times of rapid environmental change. Fox species survive rapid change by being flexible and adaptable. We must build institutions and states that are equally fox-like.

Within states, the challenge is to establish in local politics the equivalent of the Homeric feast, inspiring the possibility of decentralized collective action. We should choose leaders at all levels who maximize the resources of the community for the community rather than draining them for personal gain. Executive authority needs to be re-rooted in reciprocal social relationships, communal obligations, and networks of exchange rather than empty bureaucratic power, using Odysseus’ “singer’s skill” to inspire new narratives within our wider myths.

Referencing the Odyssey, Appiah notes such stories were not just recited—“they were discussed, evaluated, referred to in everyday life.” Doing so together is “one of the central human ways of learning to align our responses to the world.” Nolan’s film will provide an opportunity to continue this tradition. We cannot simply mirror the solutions of the mighty Homeric dead, but they can make us alive to the possibilities of our fragmentated times, and help bind our cargo against the storm.