Imagine witnessing your life being sung to you, and in the song are your greatest moments in life along with your very worst. Odysseus is in disguise, so it's like he is dead in a way, perhaps leading him to cry over his mortality. This theory could support the emphasis of Achilles on the burial rites and games for Patroklos, where he symbolically held his own funeral. It could also be argued that Odysseus cried because he escaped death once again and may still see his home. .
"One is no longer at home anywhere, so in the end one longs to be back where one can somehow be at home because it is the only place where one would wish to be at home: and that is the world of Greece." Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (tr. Silk and Stern 1981:4).
Indeed, to go home is Odysseus" destiny, to reunite with his son and his wife, Penelope, who is highest on his ascending scale of philos. As evidence to this claim, we bring in a verse by Sappho: Sappho 16 stanza 1.
Some say an army of horsemen.
some of footsoldiers, some of ships,.
is the fairest thing on earth,.
but I say it is what one loves.
What Achilles loved most was his pride, then Patroklos, and once this love was robbed from him, he was able to feel pain so intense it began his re-humanization process. What Odysseus loves most is his family, which he has been taken away from involuntarily to fight in a war that has caused so much pain. "Odysseus pretends to be insane because he does not want to go to the war. But they find him out; on advice of Palamedes, they kidnap his son Telemakhos as a threat, thus forcing him to go." (30-33 Proclus" Summary of the Cypria). .
While these are valued standpoints, I contend Homer is rather trying to allow us, the audience, to come closer into the minds of the heroes by showing you how they would react to the retelling of their ordeals. This method of poetry is much more forceful in emphasizing the tragic aspects of war.