The Man with No Portion: Achilles, Nazareth, and the Hidden Glory of Ordinary Life

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has put Homer back in public view. In Britain, print sales of the poem rose by 1,400 percent year on year during the four weeks ending July 25.¹ Readers are returning to a book many last opened under duress at sixteen; it has reappeared in classrooms and reading groups and on commuter trains. Most come for the storms and monsters. Buried in Book 11 is something quieter: a dead hero reconsidering the bargain by which he became immortal in song.

Odysseus sails to the edge of the world and summons the shades. There he meets Achilles and tries to console him. Surely the warrior honored above all others among the living must now enjoy a matching supremacy among the dead.

Achilles rejects the consolation. He would rather serve as a hired hand for another man—one Homer describes as “without a portion” (aklēros), with little livelihood—than rule over all the perished dead. The word means someone without a lot, an allotment, or a landed share. Achilles imagines not a prosperous farmer but a landless man with scarcely any claim upon the earth.²

The speech sounds like a posthumous judgment on the choice Achilles once made. As a young man, he was shown two futures: a long life without lasting fame, or a short life whose glory would never perish. He chose the song. Now, while the song continues above him, he declares in the dark that even a life near the bottom of the social order is better than kingship among the dead.³

Yet the insight stops there. Achilles tells us what he would flee toward, not what could make that life good. The hired hand’s condition is preferred, not praised—the way a person in agony chooses the lesser pain. Achilles has learned that glory cannot answer death. He has the diagnosis. He has no cure.

That verdict is especially poignant because Achilles received exactly what the heroic world promised him: imperishable fame, carried from generation to generation in song. Such fame was meant to compensate a hero for dying young. But being remembered by the living is not being restored to life. Achilles has achieved remembrance, not resurrection.⁴

The Odyssey moves closer to an answer. Calypso offers Odysseus ageless immortality on an island where nothing essential is asked of him. He refuses. He wants a mortal wife, a finite home, and the bed he built around the living trunk of an olive tree. Homer sees what Achilles missed: fidelity may be greater than fame, and a mortal home may be better than an immortal exile.⁵

Homer brings us to a threshold. He can praise return, marriage, craft, and mortal love. Christian revelation makes a further and more radical claim: the eternal Word entered these ordinary human realities and made them places of communion with God.

Achilles’s deepest question nevertheless remains. It is not simply whether fieldwork possesses dignity. It is whether anything can answer death.

The field cannot save Achilles. Christianity answers him first at the empty tomb and then walks back to Nazareth. Its claim is at once cosmic and domestic: death has been conquered, and the workshop can be made holy. The Christ who entered death and rose from it had spent most of his earthly life within the ordinary rhythms of prayer, family, obedience, and work. Christian work receives its full meaning from the Cross and the Resurrection.⁶

The Son did not enter history as an adult teacher. He was conceived and born; he grew, obeyed, prayed, and worked as a craftsman; he shared the life of a household and a village. Nazareth was not merely preparation for the Gospel; it belonged to the Gospel. The workshop belonged to the life by which Christ redeemed the world.

And he learned the trade from Joseph. Scripture records no word spoken by St. Joseph, only his deeds: he took Mary into his home, rose in the night, carried the child into Egypt, and made a home for the Holy Family in Nazareth. The Gospels call Joseph just and present him as a craftsman. St. Josemaría Escrivá observed that Joseph passed his professional skill to Jesus and made him a craftsman. A whole vocation was lived without a recorded sentence, and the Son of God was content to be formed within that hidden fidelity.⁷

The twentieth-century Spanish priest St. Josemaría Escrivá, founder of Opus Dei, spent his life drawing out what Nazareth means for ordinary Christians: “there is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.” God awaits us, he said, in the laboratory and the operating theatre, the university and the factory, the workshop and the field, the home and the whole panorama of human work.⁸

St. Josemaría taught the unity of the whole day. He rejected the division of life into an inner realm where God is met and an outer realm of professional, family, and social obligations. There is one life, flesh and spirit, and this life is called to holiness. That is why the work itself must be honest: wrongdoing remains wrongdoing, injustice remains injustice, and serious carelessness does not become prayer because it is “offered up.” What lies hidden in ordinary reality is not magic. It is a call from God, and the grace to answer it.⁹

He often summarized the lay vocation—the calling of Christians who live and work in the world—in three movements: to sanctify work, to sanctify oneself in work, and to sanctify others through work. To sanctify, in this context, means to make ordinary work part of a life directed toward God: to do it honestly, offer it to him, and use it to serve other people.¹⁰

To sanctify work is first to do honest work as well as one reasonably can. A fraudulent enterprise does not become holy when prayers are said over it, and grace is no substitute for craftsmanship. The measure of the offering, however, is love. As St. Josemaría wrote, “Before God, no occupation is in itself great or small. Everything gains the value of the Love with which it is done.”¹¹

Sanctified work can also end in apparent failure. An experiment that fails despite honest care, a repair that exceeds one’s skill, a task interrupted by illness—these too can be offered. What matters is faithful effort: the best work reasonably possible, joined to love of God and service to others.¹²

That becomes concrete quickly. It is the back of the cabinet sanded as carefully as the front; the figure checked again because someone else must rely on it; the report written so that the person reading it at seven in the morning is not made to suffer; the difficult truth stated plainly rather than hidden inside elegant language. Skill gives the work its human integrity; love directs it toward God and the good of others. Carried to the altar and offered with Christ in the Eucharist, the most material acts of ordinary life can become a spiritual sacrifice—the work itself an act of worship.¹³

To sanctify ourselves in work means receiving the working day itself as material entrusted to grace, alongside morning and evening prayer. The same assignment can train patience or feed vanity. The same interruption can awaken charity or resentment. The same success can prompt gratitude or self-worship.

The Christian undertakes this work as a child before the Father, united to Christ and sustained by the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of divine filiation—that by grace and adoption we truly become children of God—provides the foundation for this theology of work. The work unfolds before a Father who already loves us and invites us to share in the work of his Son.¹⁴

Patience with the colleague who asks the same question for the fourth time; honesty in the small figure no one would catch; returning to the task when it is dull and there is no one to impress—these are ordinary forms of the spiritual life. The virtues admired in a monastery are also tested at desks, on job sites, in kitchens, laboratories, and hospital wards.

This vision does not canonize overwork. Ordinary life also includes marriage, friendship, caregiving, citizenship, recreation, illness, unemployment, and rest. A person unable to work has lost neither vocation nor dignity. Work is for the person, not the person for work.¹⁵

To sanctify others through work begins with becoming someone others are glad to work beside. It matures into truthful speech offered within friendship and confidence. St. Josemaría described this as an apostolate—a form of Christian witness—in which conduct and speech confirm each other. Presence becomes friendship; friendship creates confidence; confidence permits the timely word.¹⁶

Achilles’s desire for greatness points toward a truer ambition: excellence ordered to love and service. St. Josemaría could call perseverance in small things done for love a form of heroism. He described the Christian vocation as making heroic verse out of the prose of each day.¹⁷

Tennyson’s Ulysses leaves the “still hearth” resolved “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” St. Josemaría’s teaching does not extinguish that aspiration; it brings heroism home. The Christian can discover heroic fidelity at the hearth, in the workshop, and in the duties nearest at hand.¹⁸

Obscurity is not a sacrament, and visibility is not a sin. A discovery, a company, a public office, or a great work of art can glorify God when ambition has been converted into service. What matters is the purpose visibility serves.

Achilles’s mistake was not that he desired glory. It was that he mistook remembrance for resurrection and an audience for eternity. He chose the glory that could be sung. The singing continues, but it cannot reach him where he is.

We are more like him than we admit. Almost every kind of contemporary work has its own small Troy: a dashboard, a ranking, a quarterly assessment, a follower count, a résumé required to look like a life well spent. Measures can reveal useful truths, discipline our efforts, and hold us accountable; a world without them would be worse. Trouble begins when an indicator stops serving the good and starts defining it—when what counts becomes only what can be seen to count.

Often the unmeasured part carries the moral weight: the care taken where no one will detect it, the patient explanation that produces no metric, the ordinary Tuesday on which fidelity costs something and attracts no notice.

Yet the Christian’s audience is not no one. It is the Father who sees in secret. This is what Achilles’s heroic world could not imagine, and it changes hidden work entirely. The Father witnesses the hours no one will audit; the kindness that earns nothing is not lost. What looks from below like obscurity is obscurity only from below. The final reward of what is done in secret is not a better reputation but communion with the Father himself.¹⁹

This brings us back to the noun behind Homer’s description. A “portion” or allotted share (klēros) could mean a lot, a piece of land, or an inheritance. To be “without a portion” (aklēros) was to lack such a share. In Achilles’s agrarian world, the phrase named a condition near the bottom of social life.

Scripture takes the language of portion and turns it over. The Levites receive no territorial inheritance because the Lord himself is their inheritance. The psalmist calls the Lord his allotted portion. Paul tells Christians engaged in ordinary labor that their inheritance comes from the Lord; elsewhere he says that those led by the Spirit are children of God and heirs with Christ. This does not romanticize deprivation. Christians remain bound to seek just wages, humane conditions, and the common good. But the absence of an earthly allotment no longer has the final word.²⁰

There is, then, a glory that makes no sound: the glory of thirty years in a village, of a workshop where God learned a trade, of lives that will never be sung and are not for that reason unknown. It does not announce itself, but it is seen.

Achilles would enter the field to escape the kingdom of the dead. The Christian enters it in the company of the risen Christ.

The field does not save us, and work is not God. But in Christ the field can become a place of encounter, offering, and service. Our final portion is not the field, not the song, not even the mortal life we hold for a time.

Our portion is God. And we do not have to leave the field to receive him.

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¹ Emma Loffhagen, “Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Gives UK Poetry Sales an Epic Boost,” The Guardian, August 4, 2026 (online), reporting NielsenIQ figures for a 1,400 percent year-on-year rise in UK print sales of The Odyssey during the four weeks ending July 25; see also Giselda Vagnoni, “As Nolan’s ‘Odyssey’ Draws Global Audiences, Sicily’s Favignana Braces for Film Tourism,” Reuters, August 5, 2026 (online).
² Homer, Odyssey 11.488–491. For aklēros (ἄκληρος), see Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, rev. Henry Stuart Jones, s.v. “ἄκληρος”: “without lot or portion”; in this context, without an allotted holding or landless. Greek text and passage available in the Scaife Viewer.
³ Homer, Iliad 9.410–416. Achilles describes the alternatives of a long homecoming without imperishable fame and a short life at Troy with enduring kleos. The description of the speech in Odyssey 11 as a “posthumous verdict” is an interpretation of the juxtaposition, not an explicit confession by Achilles.
⁴ Lorenzo F. Garcia Jr., “Kleos,” in The Cambridge Guide to Homer, ed. Corinne Ondine Pache, Casey Dué, Susan Lupack, and Robert Lamberton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 167–168 (online). Garcia characterizes kleos—the heroic fame transmitted through epic poetry—as compensation for the hero’s untimely death.
⁵ Homer, Odyssey 5.203–224, on Calypso’s offer of immortality and Odysseus’s desire for home; 23.183–204, on the bed built around the living olive tree.
⁶ Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 101 and 104 (online); St. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (September 14, 1981), no. 27, “Human Work in the Light of the Cross and the Resurrection of Christ” (online).
⁷ Matthew 1:18–25; 2:13–23; 13:55; Mark 6:3; Luke 2:41–52. See St. Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, no. 55, on Joseph transmitting his professional skill to Jesus and making him a craftsman, and no. 56 on Joseph’s role in the human upbringing of the Son of God.
⁸ St. Josemaría Escrivá, “Passionately Loving the World,” homily delivered at the University of Navarra, October 8, 1967, in Conversations with Saint Josemaría Escrivá, nos. 113–116; quotation from no. 114. The homily is reproduced by the St. Josemaría Institute.
⁹ St. Josemaría Escrivá, “Passionately Loving the World,” Conversations, no. 114, on the rejection of a “double life” and the unity of professional, social, family, and interior life; Conversations, no. 10, identifying “all honest human work” as a possible means of sanctification and apostolate.
¹⁰ St. Josemaría Escrivá, Conversations with Saint Josemaría Escrivá, no. 10, for the threefold formulation: sanctifying one’s work, sanctifying oneself in one’s work, and sanctifying others through one’s work.
¹¹ St. Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, no. 487: “Before God, no occupation is in itself great or small. Everything gains the value of the Love with which it is done.”
¹² St. Josemaría Escrivá, Conversations, no. 10. He distinguishes “human perfection,” understood as professional competence, from “Christian perfection,” understood as love of God’s will and service to humanity. See also Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 513 (online): by grace, work can become “a means of sanctification and collaboration with Christ for the salvation of others.”
¹³ Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium (November 21, 1964), no. 34; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2427. The Council teaches that the laity’s work, family life, rest, prayer, and hardships can become spiritual sacrifices offered with Christ in the Eucharist.
¹⁴ St. Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, no. 64, where divine filiation is called “the basis of the spirit of Opus Dei”; Romans 8:14–17.
¹⁵ Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2428: “Work is for man, not man for work”; see also Lumen Gentium, no. 34, which expressly includes married and family life, daily occupations, relaxation, and hardship within the laity’s spiritual offering.
¹⁶ St. Josemaría Escrivá, Conversations, no. 62. He describes Christian conduct as example and witness joined to the word, following Christ who “began to do and to teach” (Acts 1:1), and names this an “apostolate of friendship and confidence.”
¹⁷ St. Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, no. 813; “Passionately Loving the World,” Conversations, no. 116.
¹⁸ Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses” (1842), last stanza (online). The comparison concerns the speaker’s contrast between the “still hearth” and renewed heroic action; critical interpretations differ over the degree to which the dramatic monologue affirms or qualifies Ulysses’s self-presentation.
¹⁹ Matthew 6:4, 6, and 18; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 1024, on heaven as perfect communion of life and love with the Most Holy Trinity.
²⁰ Deuteronomy 18:1–2; Psalm 16:5–6; Colossians 3:23–24; Romans 8:14–17; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2434, on the just wage; St. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, nos. 19–20, on workers’ rights, remuneration, social benefits, and association.

Cover Image: Odyssee-Zyklus 10 (1864) by Friedrich Preller the Elder (Artvee)