Homer's Odyssey

The poem narrates Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from Troy, interweaving three storylines: the travels of Odysseus, the coming-of-age of his son Telemachus, and the siege of his household by the suitors who seek to marry his wife Penelope.[1]

The poem begins not with Odysseus but with his son Telemachus, now a young man who has grown up without his father. Prompted by Athena (disguised as Mentes), Telemachus journeys to Pylos (Nestor) and Sparta (Menelaus and Helen) seeking news of Odysseus. These books establish the crisis at Ithaca — the suitors consuming Odysseus’s wealth — and Telemachus’s maturation.[2]

Odysseus is released from the island of the nymph Calypso, shipwrecked on the island of the Phaeacians, and there narrates his adventures to King Alcinous in the great extended flashback of Books 9–12:[4]

• The Cicones — Raiding and its consequences
• The Lotus-Eaters — The temptation of forgetfulness
• The Cyclops Polyphemus — The most famous episode; Odysseus’s cunning (“My name is Nobody”) and the blinding of Poseidon’s son, which earns divine wrath
• Aeolus and the bag of winds — So close to home, then blown back by the crew’s folly
• The Laestrygonians — Giant cannibals who destroy most of the fleet
• Circe — The sorceress who turns men to pigs; Odysseus lives with her for a year
• The Nekyia (Book 11) — Odysseus’s descent to the underworld, where he consults the shade of the prophet Tiresias and encounters the dead: his mother Anticleia, Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon
• The Sirens — Odysseus, tied to the mast, hears their song
• Scylla and Charybdis — The impossible choice between two dangers
• The Cattle of Helios — The crew’s fatal transgression; Zeus destroys the last ship

Odysseus arrives on Ithaca disguised as a beggar by Athena. He is recognized by his old dog Argos (who dies), by his nurse Eurycleia (by a scar), and plots with Telemachus to destroy the suitors. Penelope — whose intelligence matches Odysseus’s own — devises the test of the bow. Odysseus strings it, slaughters the suitors in the great hall, and is finally reunited with Penelope. Their recognition scene, hinging on the secret of their marriage bed, is one of the great moments of Greek literature.

• Nostos — The return home; the longing for oikos (household) and identity
• Mētis — Cunning intelligence, Odysseus’s defining quality
• Identity and disguise — Odysseus is constantly concealing, revealing, and testing identity
• Memory and forgetting — The Lotus-Eaters, Circe, Calypso all represent the temptation to forget home
• Hospitality (xenia) — The Odyssey systematically tests the laws of guest-friendship; the suitors’ violation of xenia justifies their destruction
• Civilization and savagery — Each encounter tests what it means to be civilized (the Phaeacians represent the ideal; the Cyclopes the opposite)

Some scholars believe the Odyssey was composed by a different poet than the Iliad — the “Poet of the Odyssey” rather than the same Homer. Arguments include differences in vocabulary, theology, social structure, and narrative technique. Others maintain a single poet composed both. The Odyssey does seem to be a slightly later poem and presupposes knowledge of the Iliad.

The Odyssey has been adapted, reimagined, and responded to across millennia: Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Inferno (Canto 26), Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” Joyce’s Ulysses, Kazantzakis’s Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. It remains the archetypal journey narrative.