The Odyssey

The gods meet while Poseidon is away and agree that Odysseus has suffered long enough. Athena goes to Ithaca disguised as a family friend and finds the suitors feasting in his hall. She tells Telemachus to stop moping, call an assembly, and go looking for news of his father.

Telemachus calls the men of Ithaca together and demands the suitors leave. They refuse and blame Penelope, revealing her trick with the unfinished shroud. Nobody supports him. He borrows a ship and slips away at night with Athena's help.

Telemachus reaches old Nestor, who received him warmly, sacrifices to the gods, and tells him about the scattered returns of the Greek fleet. He knows nothing about Odysseus, but he tells the story of Agamemnon, murdered at home by his wife's lover, and of Orestes who avenged him. It is a warning and a model.

Telemachus arrives in the middle of a wedding feast. Helen and Menelaus, back together and oddly civil about Troy, recognise him by his resemblance to his father. Menelaus reports that Odysseus is alive, held captive by the nymph Calypso. Meanwhile the suitors set an ambush for Telemachus's voyage home.

Hermes orders Calypso to release Odysseus. She offers him immortality one last time and he refuses it for home. He builds a raft, sails seventeen days, and is wrecked by Poseidon. A sea goddess gives him a veil that keeps him afloat, and he crawls ashore on Phaeacia and sleeps under a bush.

The princess Nausicaa comes to the river to wash clothes. Odysseus wakes, naked and filthy, and has to talk his way out of terrifying her. He does it with a speech of enormous tact. She gives him clothes and directions to her parents' palace.

Odysseus enters the Phaeacian court under Athena's protective mist and supplicates the queen. He is fed and promised passage home, still without giving his name. The Phaeacians are presented as an almost impossibly civilised people.

At the games and the feast, the blind bard Demodocus sings about the Trojan horse. Odysseus weeps and cannot hide it. Alcinous finally asks him outright who he is.

Odysseus names himself and begins his story: the raid on the Cicones, the Lotus Eaters, and then Polyphemus. He escapes the giant's cave by giving his name as Nobody and hiding under sheep, then shouts his real name from the ship. Polyphemus asks his father Poseidon to curse him.

Aeolus gives him the winds tied in a bag; his crew opens it in sight of Ithaca and blows them back. The Laestrygonians destroy all but one ship. On Circe's island she turns his men into pigs, he resists her with a herb from Hermes, and they stay a year before she sends him to the underworld.

At the edge of the world Odysseus summons the dead. Tiresias warns him about the sun god's cattle. He meets his mother, who died of grief, and cannot embrace her. He meets Agamemnon, murdered at home, and Achilles, who says he would rather be a poor man's hired hand alive than king of the dead.

He hears the Sirens tied to the mast while his crew row on with wax in their ears. He chooses to lose six men to Scylla rather than the whole ship to Charybdis. Trapped by weather on the sun god's island, his starving crew eat the forbidden cattle and are destroyed. Odysseus alone drifts to Calypso, and the story catches up with the present.

The Phaeacians ferry him home asleep and set him on the shore with his treasure. Poseidon punishes them by turning their ship to stone. Odysseus wakes and does not recognise his own island. Athena appears, they trade lies affectionately, and she disguises him as an old beggar.

Odysseus goes to Eumaeus, his loyal pig farmer, who feeds the stranger generously without knowing him. Odysseus tests him with an invented life story. Eumaeus's kindness to a beggar is set deliberately against the suitors' behaviour in the palace.

Athena sends Telemachus home, steering him past the ambush. He lands away from town and goes to Eumaeus's hut. Eumaeus tells the story of how he was born a prince and sold into slavery as a child.

With Eumaeus out of the room, Athena restores Odysseus's real appearance and he tells Telemachus who he is. They weep, then immediately start planning. They agree to tell nobody, not even Penelope.

The beggar walks into town and is abused on the road. At the palace gate his old dog Argos, lying neglected on a dung heap, lifts his head, recognises him after twenty years, and dies. Odysseus cannot acknowledge him. In the hall the suitor Antinous throws a stool at him.

A local beggar named Irus challenges the newcomer and Odysseus knocks him down with one restrained punch. Penelope appears before the suitors and extracts gifts from them. The tension in the hall keeps rising.

Penelope interviews the stranger. He invents a story that convinces her he has met her husband and she weeps. She orders the old nurse Eurycleia to wash his feet, and the nurse recognises the boar scar on his thigh. Odysseus seizes her by the throat and swears her to silence. Penelope then announces the contest of the bow.

Odysseus lies awake, furious, and has to talk himself down. Omens accumulate. The suitors mock him again at dinner. A prophet in the hall has a vision of blood on the walls and of the men there already being dead, and they laugh at him.

Penelope brings out the great bow. Every suitor fails to string it. Odysseus reveals himself to Eumaeus and Philoetius and has the doors locked. He takes the bow, strings it as easily as a musician fitting a string to a lyre, and puts an arrow through all twelve axes.

Odysseus shoots Antinous through the throat and announces who he is. With his son and two herdsmen he kills every suitor in the hall. He spares the bard and the herald. The disloyal servant women are made to clear the bodies and are then hanged.

Eurycleia wakes Penelope, who refuses to believe it. She tests him by ordering their bed moved. Odysseus erupts, describing how he built it around a rooted olive tree. That is the proof only he could give. They are reunited and spend the night telling each other twenty years.

The suitors' souls arrive in the underworld. Odysseus goes to his father Laertes and tests even him before revealing himself. The dead men's families arm for revenge, a small battle begins, and Athena stops it and forces an oath of peace on Ithaca.