Summary: The Odyssey

The GIST

The Odyssey, attributed to Homer, is the story of a man trying to get home. Odysseus, king of the island of Ithaca and the cleverest of the Greeks who fought at Troy, won the war in ten years and then needed ten more to make the voyage back. Monsters, witches, cannibals, storms and angry gods stand in his way. At home, where everyone assumes he is dead, his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus are trapped in their own house by a crowd of men who want to marry the queen and take the kingdom.

It is among the oldest works of literature still read for pleasure. The poem took shape in Greek around the eighth or seventh century BC, growing out of generations of oral storytelling, and it was performed aloud by singers long before most people could read. Whether a single poet called Homer ever existed is something scholars still argue about. What nobody disputes is its reach. Together with the Iliad it formed the basis of education in the ancient Mediterranean and stands at the start of the Western literary tradition. It has been called the birthplace of literary fiction, T. E. Lawrence described it as "the greatest novel ever written," and when BBC Culture polled experts in 2018 to find literature's most enduring narrative, this one came first.

The Story

The poem runs to twenty-four books and a little over twelve thousand lines, and it does not start where you might expect. It opens in the middle of things, in the final stretch of the hero's absence, and fills in the missing years through stories its characters tell.

The son's search. The first four books belong to Telemachus. He was a baby when his father sailed for Troy; now he is a young man watching 108 loutish suitors, led by the arrogant Antinous and Eurymachus, eat and drink their way through his inheritance while they pressure his mother to choose a new husband. Penelope has held them off with a trick. She promised to remarry once she finished weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's aged father, Laertes, and every night she secretly unpicked the day's work. The goddess Athena, who favors this family, arrives in disguise, first as Mentes and then as Mentor, and tells the boy to go and find out what became of his father. He sails to old Nestor, who reports that the Greek commander Agamemnon was murdered soon after returning from the war, and then to Sparta, where Menelaus passes on what he learned from a shape-shifting sea god: Odysseus is alive, held on an island by the nymph Calypso.

The castaway. Only now do we meet the hero. Calypso, whose name comes from a Greek word meaning to cover or conceal, has kept him as her lover on the island of Ogygia, hidden from the world. Athena pleads his case to Zeus, who sends the messenger Hermes to secure his release. Odysseus sets out on a raft, and Poseidon, god of the sea and his sworn enemy, smashes it in a storm. Half drowned, helped by a sea nymph, he swims to the land of the Phaeacians, where Athena steers the princess Nausicaa to find him. At the court of her parents, King Alcinous and Queen Arete, the stranger is fed, sheltered and honored, and he shines in the athletic games. Then the bard Demodocus sings about the Trojan War, and the guest breaks down. Asked who he is, he tells them, and for four books he becomes the narrator of his own legend.

The wanderings. Leaving Troy, his men sacked the city of the Cicones and lingered over the plunder until reinforcements arrived and drove them off with heavy losses. They reached the lotus-eaters, whose fruit made sailors forget they had ever wanted to go home. Then came the cave of Polyphemus, a one-eyed Cyclops and a son of Poseidon, who trapped them and began eating them; the only gift he offered his guest was a promise to eat him last. Odysseus told the giant his name was Nobody, got him drunk, blinded him and slipped away. And then pride undid the triumph. From the departing ship he could not resist shouting his real name and address, and Polyphemus called on his father for revenge. Much of what follows is Poseidon collecting on that debt.

Aeolus, keeper of the winds, gave them a sealed bag that would have carried them straight to Ithaca. They came within sight of home, the crew opened the bag, and the winds blew them all the way back. The giant, man-eating Laestrygonians destroyed every ship but one. On the island of Aeaea the enchantress Circe turned the crew into pigs; Hermes gave Odysseus the herb moly to resist her magic, he forced her to restore his men, and then stayed a year as her lover. On her instructions he sailed to the edge of the world, where the living can speak with the dead. There the ghost of the prophet Tiresias foretold that he would reach home but would one day have to travel again, and he met the shades of his own mother, of Agamemnon, who warned him about treacherous homecomings, and of Achilles.

Back at sea, he had his men plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast so that he alone could hear the Sirens sing and live. He threaded the strait between the whirlpool Charybdis and the many-headed Scylla. Last came the island of the sun god Helios, whose sacred cattle he ordered his crew not to touch. They ate them anyway, and Zeus answered by destroying the last ship. Odysseus alone drifted ashore on Calypso's island, which is where we found him.

The beggar at the door. Moved by the tale, the Phaeacians load him with gifts and carry him home. Athena disguises him as an old beggar so that he can see for himself who has stayed loyal. The swineherd Eumaeus, not recognizing his master, gives the stranger food and a bed. Telemachus returns from Sparta, slipping past an ambush the suitors have laid for him, and father and son are reunited in secret. At the palace the old dog Argos, neglected for years, knows him at once and wags his tail; the suitors, who do not, jeer at the beggar in his own hall, and on the way there he is even kicked. The Odysseus who once shouted his name at a Cyclops swallows the insult and waits. The old nurse Eurycleia recognizes a scar on his leg. Father and son quietly remove the weapons from the hall. And Penelope, still unaware who the beggar is, announces that she will marry whichever man can string her husband's great bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe heads. How that contest ends, and what it takes for a wife to be sure the stranger is truly her husband, is where the reader should take over.

What It's Really About

The Greeks had a word for the poem's subject: nostos, homecoming. It is set against other returns from Troy that went wrong. Agamemnon came home to a wife who killed him; Achilles won glory and never came home at all. Odysseus's return depends as much on Penelope's faithfulness and wit as on his own.

Running through every episode is xenia, the sacred bond between guest and host. The poem keeps showing how it should be done and how it should not. The Phaeacians are the model: they feed, shelter, entertain, gift and escort the stranger without even knowing his name. Polyphemus, who eats his guests, is the nightmare version, and Calypso fails in a gentler way by refusing to let her guest leave. The suitors are the worst offenders of all, guests who will not go, and when Antinous refuses a crust to a beggar the poem makes plain that he may look like a king but is not one.

Then there is testing. Odysseus tests the loyalty of everyone in his house before revealing himself, and they in turn test whether he is who he claims to be. Omens thread through the action too, usually large birds attacking smaller ones, along with dreams, thunder and even a well-timed sneeze. One modern reader boiled the moral down to two lessons: heed the gods and resist hubris. Most of the disasters come from someone ignoring a divine warning or from the hero's boasting, and by the end he has learned patience.

Part of the fascination is the hero himself, a strategist and habitual liar rather than a simple strongman, and part is the poem's wide human world. Women and slaves, such as Penelope, Nausicaa, Eurycleia and Eumaeus, have larger roles here than in almost any other ancient work. Its language is simple, direct and fast, built from speeches, long similes drawn from everyday life and the repeated phrases of oral poetry. Readers who expect a dusty monument are often surprised to find a story that moves, with a structure of flashbacks and tales within tales that feels modern. Its descendants are everywhere, from Virgil and Dante to James Joyce's Ulysses, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad and Madeline Miller's Circe.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who loves adventure stories, mythology or fantasy will find the original of them all here, and so will readers curious about where so much of Western storytelling begins. It is more of a page-turner than the Iliad and can be read on its own. Choose a lively modern translation, in prose if you are more used to novels than verse, and it is far easier going than its age suggests.