How long did it take Odysseus to get home?

Ten years and ten more

The Odyssey keeps two clocks. The first is the war: Hermes tells Calypso that Odysseus fought nine years around Troy and sailed in the tenth, after the city fell (Odyssey 5.105–107). The second is the homecoming, which takes another decade. When Odysseus finally reveals himself to his son, he puts the two together.

Such as I am, it is I, who after long wandering and much hardship have got home in the twentieth year to my own country.

The seer Halitherses had predicted it when the fleet left Ithaca: Odysseus would lose all his men and come home in the twentieth year, recognized by no one (2.174–176).

Where the ten years went

Add up the stops Odysseus describes to the Phaeacians, and the long waits stand out. In order:

1. Ismarus. A raid on the Cicones that costs six men from every ship.
2. The lotus-eaters. Nine days blown off course past Cape Malea, landing on the tenth (9.82–84).
3. The Cyclops. Two nights shut in Polyphemus’s cave.
4. Aeolus. A whole month as the wind king’s guest (10.14), then nine days’ sailing until Ithaca is in sight (10.28–30).
5. The Laestrygonians. Six days and nights of rowing to reach them (10.80–81).
6. Circe. A full year of feasting, until the crew asks to go home (10.467–474).
7. The Sun’s island. A month of south winds keeps the ship ashore (12.325–326).
8. Adrift. Nine days on the wreckage to Ogygia (12.447–448).
9. Calypso. Seven years, until she lets him go in the eighth (7.259–261).
10. The raft. Four days to build it, seventeen at sea, a wreck on the eighteenth and two days and nights in the water (5.262–263, 5.278–280, 5.388–390).

The named stays alone come to more than eight years: seven with Calypso, one with Circe, and two months with Aeolus and on the Sun’s island. Weeks of rowing and storms fill the rest. The biggest block by far is Calypso’s island, the subject of who Calypso was.

A short poem about a long time

Homer does not narrate those years in order. The poem opens in the tenth year, with Odysseus already seven years on Ogygia, and its own action covers only about six weeks. The earlier adventures arrive as a story told after dinner. How that frame works is explained on what the Odyssey is about.

Twenty years at home

On Ithaca the clock reads twenty. Penelope has waited since he sailed, and for three of those years she held off her suitors with a shroud she wove by day and unpicked by night (why she unraveled it). Telemachus, a baby when his father left, is a grown man. Odysseus’s mother has died of longing for him. And Argos, the hunting dog he raised before the war, knows him after twenty years and dies, the scene on who Argos was.

Greek has words for that long ache: nostos, the homecoming, and algos, pain. In 1688 a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, joined them to describe homesickness as a medical condition: nostalgia.