home, despite the temptation to remain immortal in the arms of Kalypso,by announcing his desire for his wife in these words:My quiet Penelope—how well I know—would seem a shade before your majesty,death and old age being unknown to you,while she must die. Yet, it is true, eachday I long for home (Berry, 1977, p. 125).And when, after Odysseus refuses to accept Penelope’s order to move theirbed outside the bedroom—a violation of a pledge they had made to eachother never to do—thereby identifying himself as her true husband aftertwenty years apart, he finds himself again in her arms. Berry reminds usthat Homer compared the reunion to the values of earth:Now from his heart into his eyes the acheof longing mounted, and he wept at last,his dear wife, clear and faithful in his arms, longed foras the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmerspent in rough water where his ship went down . . . (p. 127).As an anti-Iliad, The Odyssey’s great theme, Berry wrote, is the value thathome assumes for its hero.Like Berry, Eiseley too admired Homer’s telling of the tale because itseemed to him, we might say, a story of faith in the distance and the end ofdistance. And yet it was not Homer’s Odyssey with which he most stronglyidentified. Giovanni Pascoli’s “Ultimo Viaggio,” a 1904 reworking of thestory’s materials, seems to have captivated his imagination most. Pascoli,like Dante, Tennyson, and Kazantzakis, imagined Odysseus, in keepingwith the modern, Faustian temperament, becoming restless upon his re-turn home and embarking on yet another—his last—voyage abandoninghome again for the open sea. Eiseley (1969) pointed out that Odysseus’return to Ithaca, his homeward goal, was in a sense an anticlimax—thatthe magical spell wrought by Circe would follow the hero into the prosaicworld. But Pascoli’s theme is quite different from that of a Kazantzakis,who likewise imagined Odysseus returning to the sea, aspiring to becomeaworld-conquering explorer, or a Tennyson, whose Ulysses dedicated him-self forever to be “strong in will,/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,”who desires “To follow knowledge like a sinking star,/Beyond the utmostbound of human thought.” Pascoli, on the other hand (Eiseley, 1969):picks up the Odyssean tale when Odysseus, grown old and restless,drawn on by migratory birds, sets forth to retrace his magical jour-ney, the journey of all men down the pathway of their youth, theroad beyond retracing. Circe’s isle lies at last before the wanderer