One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired computer scientist who was then eighty-one, asked me, for reasons I thought I understood at the time, if he could sit in on the course, and I said yes. Once a week for the next fifteen weeks, he would make the trip from the house in the Long Island suburbs where I grew up, a modest split-level he and my mother still lived in, to the riverside campus of Bard College, where I teach. At ten past ten each Friday morning, he would take a seat among the freshmen, who were not even a quarter his age, and join in the discussion of this old poem, an epic about long journeys and long marriages and what it means to yearn for home.

It was deep winter when the term began, and my father was worrying a great deal about the weather: the snow on the windshield, the sleet on the roads, the ice on the walkways. He was afraid of falling, he said, his vowels still marked by his Bronx childhood: fawling. I would stay close to him as he crept along the narrow asphalt paths that led to the bland brick building where the class met, or up the walkway to the steep-gabled house at the edge of campus which was my home for a few days each week. Often, if he was too worn out after class to make the three-hour drive back home, he would sleep over in the extra bedroom that serves as my study, lying on a narrow daybed that had been my childhood bed. This bed, which he had built himself fifty years earlier, had a little secret: it was made out of a door, a cheap, hollow door, to which he’d attached four wooden legs that are as sturdy today as they were when he built it. I would think of this bed often a year later, after he became seriously ill, and my brothers and sister and I had to start fathering our father, anxiously watching him as he slept fitfully in a series of enormous, elaborately mechanized contraptions that hardly seemed like beds at all.

But that came later. Now, in the early months of 2011, he would come each week and spend the night in the bed he had made, in the house where I spent a part of each week.

It used to amuse my father that I divided my time among several places: this house on the rural campus; the mellow old home in New Jersey, where my boys and their mother lived and where I would spend long weekends; my apartment in New York City, which, as time passed and my life expanded, had become little more than a pit stop between train trips. “You’re always on the road,” my father would sometimes say at the end of a phone conversation, and as he said the word “road” I could picture him shaking his head in gentle bewilderment. For nearly all his adult life, my father lived in one house, the one he moved into a month before I was born—which over time filled up with five children and then was emptied of them, leaving him and my mother to live a life that was quiet and circumspect, at least in part because she didn’t like to travel—and which he left for the last time one January afternoon in 2012, a year to the day after he started my class.

The Odyssey course ran from late January to early May. A week or so after it ended, I happened to be on the phone with my friend Froma, a classics scholar who had been my mentor in graduate school and had lately enjoyed hearing my periodic reports on Daddy’s progress in the seminar. At some point in the conversation, she mentioned a cruise that she’d taken a couple of years earlier, called “Journey of Odysseus: Retracing the Odyssey Through the Ancient Mediterranean.” “You should do it!” she exclaimed. “After this semester, after teaching the Odyssey to your father, how could you not go?” Not everyone agreed: when I e-mailed a travel-agent friend to ask her what she thought, her response came back within a minute: “Avoid theme cruises at all costs!” But Froma had been my teacher, after all, and I was still in the habit of obeying her. The next morning, I called my father.

As we talked, we each went online to look at the cruise company’s Web site. The itinerary, we read, would follow the mythic hero Odysseus’ convoluted, decade-long journey as he made his way home from the Trojan War, plagued by shipwrecks and monsters. It would begin at Troy, the site of which is in present-day Turkey, and end on Ithaki, a small island in the Ionian Sea which purports to be Ithaca, the place Odysseus called home. “Journey of Odysseus” was an “educational” cruise, and my father, although contemptuous of anything that struck him as being a needless luxury, was a great believer in education. And so, a few weeks later, in June, fresh from our recent immersion in the text of the Homeric epic, we took the cruise, which lasted ten days, one for each year of Odysseus’ long journey.

The hero’s return to Ithaca is hardly the only voyage in which the Odyssey is interested. It is not for nothing that, in the original Greek, the first word in the first line of the twelve thousand one hundred and ten that make up the epic is andra: “man.” The poem begins with the story of Odysseus’ son, a youth in search of his long-lost father. It focusses next on the hero himself, first as he recalls the fabulous adventures he had after leaving Troy and then as he struggles to return home, where he will reclaim his identity as father, husband, and king, taking terrible vengeance on the suitors who tried to woo his wife and usurp his throne. And, in its final book, it gives us a vision of what a man might look like after his life’s adventures are over: the hero’s elderly father, the last person with whom Odysseus is reunited, now a decrepit recluse who has withdrawn to his orchard, tired of life. The boy, the adult, the ancient: the three ages of man. The underlying journey that the poem charts is a man’s passage through life, from birth to death. How do you get there? What is the journey like? And how do you tell the story of it?

As far as my father was concerned, Odysseus wasn’t worth all the fuss the poem makes about him. Again and again, as the semester wore on, he would find a way to rail against the legendary adventurer. “Hero?” he would sputter at some point during each class session. “He’s no hero!”

His contempt amused the students, but it didn’t surprise me. The first adjective used of Odysseus in the epic—it comes in line 1, soon after andra—is polytropos. The literal meaning of this word is “of many turns”: poly means “many” and tropos is a “turning” (which is why a flower that turns toward the sun is known as a heliotrope). On one level, the word accurately describes the shape of Odysseus’ journey: he’s the man who gets where he’s going by meandering—indeed, often by travelling in circles. In more than one of his adventures, he leaves a place only to come back to it, not always on purpose. And then there is the biggest circle of all, the one that brings him back to Ithaca, the home he has left so long ago that, by the time he returns, he and his loved ones are unrecognizable to one another. But “of many turns” is also a canny way to describe the hero himself. Throughout Greek literature, Odysseus is a notorious trickster, given to devious twists and evasions. In contrast with Achilles, the hero of the Iliad—who declares at one point that he hates “like the Gates of Death” the man who says one thing but means another—the hero of the Odyssey has no scruples about lying to get what he wants.