The return of Odysseus

Odysseus was away from Ithaca for twenty years: ten at war, and ten more trying to get home.

A story that starts in the middle

The Odyssey, the second poem credited to Homer, also has 24 books, and Britannica suggests it may belong near the end of the 8th century BCE, a little later than the Iliad. It opens when the hero has already been gone for nearly twenty years. On the island of Ithaca, young men called the suitors have moved into Odysseus’ palace, eating his food and pressing his wife Penelope to marry one of them. His son Telemachus, now grown up, is helpless. The goddess Athena visits him in disguise and sends him to the mainland to ask Nestor at Pylos and Menelaus at Sparta for news of his father.

Odysseus himself first appears in book 5, on the island of the nymph Calypso, who has kept him there for seven years and offers to make him immortal if he stays. He refuses, because he wants to go home. The gods order her to let him go, and he builds a raft, is shipwrecked by Poseidon and washes up among the Phaeacians. At their king’s feast he finally tells his story, and books 9 to 12 are his own account of the voyage.

Monsters and islands

The adventures are the parts most people remember. In the land of the Lotus-eaters, men who taste the lotus forget about going home. In the cave of the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon, Odysseus tells the giant that his name is "Nobody", gets him drunk and blinds him with a sharpened stake, so that when Polyphemus shouts for help, he cries that "Nobody" is hurting him. Odysseus escapes clinging under the belly of a ram, but by shouting his real name as he sails away he earns Poseidon’s anger, which delays him for years. Later the wind god Aeolus gives him a bag holding the storm winds. Within sight of Ithaca his crew open it, thinking it holds treasure, and the winds blow them all the way back.

The witch-goddess Circe turns his men into pigs, and he stays with her for a year. On her advice he sails to the edge of the world and calls up the spirits of the dead, where the prophet Tiresias tells him how to get home and he meets his own mother, who died of grief while he was away. He has himself tied to the mast so that he can hear the Sirens sing without steering onto the rocks. He passes between Scylla, a six-headed monster, and Charybdis, a whirlpool. Finally his starving crew eat the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, and Zeus destroys the ship. Odysseus alone survives and drifts to Calypso’s island.

Odysseus kills the suitors with the help of Telemachus and two loyal servants. Even then Penelope tests him. She orders the servants to move their bed out of the bedroom, and Odysseus angrily replies that it cannot be moved, because he built it himself around the trunk of a living olive tree. Only the real Odysseus could know that secret, and she runs to embrace him.

Can we map the voyage?

People have tried to locate every island since antiquity. The geographer Eratosthenes, in the 3rd century BCE, doubted that it could be done, and Strabo quotes his joke: you will find where Odysseus wandered when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds. Troy and Ithaca are real places, though some modern scholars question whether Homer’s Ithaca matches the island called Ithaki today. Most of the stops in books 9 to 12 are best read as poetry, not as a ship’s log.