The Odyssey

The Trojan War has been over for ten years. Every Greek commander who survived it has either reached home or died trying. One has done neither. Odysseus, king of the small island of Ithaca, is still missing, and by now most people assume he is dead.

At home in Ithaca, that assumption has consequences. A crowd of local noblemen has moved into his palace, eating through his herds and his wine and pressing his wife Penelope to accept that she is a widow and pick one of them as her new husband. She refuses, stalls, and buys time with a trick: she promises to choose a suitor once she has finished weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's father, and then unpicks her day's weaving every night. His son Telemachus, who was a baby when his father sailed, is now a young man with no authority and no idea what to do.

The poem opens by following Telemachus, not Odysseus. Prompted by the goddess Athena, he sails to the mainland to ask the veterans of Troy whether anyone knows what happened to his father. Nestor tells him little. Menelaus tells him more: Odysseus is alive, held on a distant island by the nymph Calypso.

Only then does the poem turn to Odysseus himself. Calypso has kept him for seven years and offered to make him immortal. He has said no, and he sits on her beach weeping at the sea. Released at last on the gods' orders, he builds a raft, is wrecked by a storm, and washes up naked on the shore of Phaeacia, where the young princess Nausicaa finds him and brings him to her parents' court.

There, as a guest with his name still hidden, he tells the story of the ten years nobody has heard. This is the famous stretch of the poem, and it is worth noticing that Odysseus is narrating it himself, to an audience he is trying to impress. He describes the land of the Lotus Eaters, where men who eat the local fruit lose all desire to go home. He describes blinding the one-eyed giant Polyphemus and escaping his cave under the bellies of sheep, and then, in a moment of pride he pays for across the whole poem, shouting his real name back at the blinded giant, who curses him to his father Poseidon. He describes the bag of winds that his crew opened within sight of Ithaca; the witch Circe, who turned his men into pigs and then became his lover for a year; the journey to the edge of the underworld to consult the prophet Tiresias, where he met his own mother's ghost and could not embrace her; the Sirens, whose song he alone heard, tied to the mast; the passage between Scylla and Charybdis that cost him six men; and finally the island of the sun god, where his starving crew slaughtered the forbidden cattle and were destroyed at sea for it. Every man who left Troy with Odysseus is now dead. He alone drifted to Calypso.

The Phaeacians, moved, ferry him home in a single night and set him ashore on Ithaca asleep. He wakes in his own country and does not recognise it. Athena disguises him as an old beggar, and the last half of the poem becomes something much stranger than an adventure: a slow, tense infiltration of his own household. He is sheltered by his loyal swineherd Eumaeus. He reveals himself to Telemachus and to nobody else. He is insulted, kicked, and thrown at by the suitors in his own hall. His old dog Argos recognises him and dies. His childhood nurse recognises the scar on his leg while washing his feet and he grips her throat to keep her silent. Penelope, whether or not she suspects, announces a contest: she will marry whichever man can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through the sockets of twelve axe heads.

Every suitor fails. The beggar asks for a turn. He strings the bow easily, makes the shot, and then turns the weapon on the men in the room. With Telemachus, Eumaeus, and the cowherd Philoetius, he kills them all, and hangs the servant women who slept with them. The palace is washed clean.

Penelope, alone among everyone, refuses to accept him on sight. She sets one last test, ordering the marriage bed moved out of their chamber. Odysseus reacts with fury, because he built that bed himself around a living olive tree rooted in the ground and it cannot be moved, and only he and she could know it. That is the proof she wanted. They are reunited.

The families of the dead suitors come for revenge, and the poem ends not with another battle but with Athena forcing a peace on Ithaca.