In other words, the heroes left a stable world, but their absence for a decade of war so weakened society on the home front that their world completely collapsed. The archaeological record, as well as what passed for the historical record of the late Bronze Age, shows that following a great conflict at Troy, the great palace complexes and urban centers of Greece soon collapsed, plunging Greece into a Dark Age. Homer’s Odyssey is the only surviving poem from a cycle of poems called the Nostoi (“the Returns”), which told of the returns home of the various Greek heroes at Troy. Homer’s narrative of Odysseus’ return home to Ithaca was so famous in the ancient world that the work’s title, Odyssey, has become a noun meaning “journey,” especially a long journey. Of course, when the hero returns home, he or she is different because of the adventure, and he/she returns home anew. Joseph Campbell, the great myth scholar, described the hero’s story as departure – adventure – return. But to start such a voyage of discovery, what better starting place than Homer’s Odyssey? These will range from Baum’s The Wizard of Oz to Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. For 2012, I thought that I’d spend the year devoting myself to books that involve, or, in some way, invoke the idea of traveling.
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