A NOTE before you read further: this column opens inside a scene from Nolan’s Odyssey. If you haven’t seen it and plan to, you may want to come back after.

He is a beggar at his own hearth. Penelope does not know him. She has no reason to expect the truth from him, and no way to check it if he lies. He tells her anyway. Not the version Ithaca will get. He tells her about the horse. How the trick that broke Troy also broke an older law. How winning and becoming the thing you feared stopped being different acts, that same night.

Nobody made him say this. It costs him the one thing he still needs from her. He risks it before he has even reclaimed his name, his house, his throne. There is no audience for this confession. No cameras, no chorus, no Ithaca watching. Just a woman he has not yet told he loves, and a man who has decided that the truth is worth more to him than the myth.

That is the part I cannot stop turning over. Not that he did wrong at Troy. Every soldier does wrong at Troy. It is that he chose the one moment he had nothing to gain from honesty, and was honest anyway. I don’t think we build that moment into our politics anymore. I am not sure we ever did.

Homer’s........

© Dawn