To ancients and moderns alike, the Mediterranean’s thalassic imaginary reveals a relationship between two forms of travel: that which is wilfully taken (by the pilgrim) and that which is forced (on the refugee). While pilgrims regard both journey and destination as quests for redemption, today the refugee finds no solidarity in the pilgrim. Left to plead for survival with pilgrims who look away, refugees have no hope to share with anyone. Exploring this tragic rift between pilgrim and refugee at a metatheoretical level, this paper revisits three Mediterranean figures: Odysseus, Socrates, and Paul, whose choices are not that different from ours—choices in whose willed journey and received exile we often exchange roles between the state of being a pilgrim and a refugee. More central to the argument that is developed around these figures is the sense of Mediterraneity as a narrative of totality in whose multiplicity, like that of grace, “exceeds itself” (Alain Badiou). The aim is to show that it is in this exceeding—also identified with the totality’s exteriority (Emmanuel Levinas) and revelation (Paul Tillich)—that the choices of travel take an ethical attribute which, this paper claims, could well be lost. It is also in the revelation gleaned from the Mediterranean-as-totality’s exteriority that we seek to cope with the lost ethic of Mediterranean aesthetics, from whose revelation we have drawn so much meaning if not solace and strength.