What is the Odyssey about?

The story in brief

The Odyssey is one of the two great Greek epics credited to Homer: about 12,000 lines of verse in 24 books, probably composed in the late eighth or the seventh century BC out of a long tradition of oral song. Who Homer was, and whether one poet made both epics, is still debated. The subject is announced in the first line.

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

“Ingenious” is Butler’s word for polytropos, the man of many turns. The hero’s weapon is his mind, and his goal is the most ordinary thing in the world: to get home. The Odyssey is not a sequel in the modern sense, but it picks up where the Trojan story leaves off. The Iliad ends with Hector’s funeral, before Troy falls; the Odyssey looks back on the wooden horse and brings back Achilles and Agamemnon as ghosts (see what the Iliad is about).

How the poem is built

Homer does not begin at Troy. He begins in the tenth year of the return, with Odysseus stuck on Calypso’s island, and he gives the first four books to someone else.

1. Books 1–4: Telemachus. Athena, in disguise, rouses Odysseus’s son to face the suitors eating up his house, then to sail to Pylos and Sparta for news of his father.
2. Books 5–8: the release. The gods order Calypso to let Odysseus go. He builds a raft, is wrecked, and washes up among the Phaeacians.
3. Books 9–12: the flashback. At King Alcinous’s table he tells his own adventures: the lotus-eaters, the Cyclops, the bag of winds, Circe, the land of the dead, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the Sun.
4. Books 13–24: the homecoming. Back on Ithaca in a beggar’s rags, he tests his household, wins the contest of the bow, defeats the suitors, and is tested in turn by Penelope.

Who tells what

Most of the monsters people remember come from one after-dinner speech, in Odysseus’s own voice. Homer’s listeners knew what that meant. This hero lies superbly: back on Ithaca he invents one false life story after another, and Athena teases him for never giving up his tricks even in his own country (13.291–295). King Alcinous, at least, is enchanted.

you have told the story of your own misfortunes, and those of the Argives, as though you were a practiced bard

The poem even contains a professional singer, the blind Demodocus, whose song about the wooden horse makes Odysseus weep and gives him away. It is a poem that knows how stories are made, and who gets to tell them.

The ending, and the word

It ends with the household restored and a peace imposed by Athena, while Tiresias’s last journey, an oar carried inland, still lies ahead; more on how the Odyssey ends.

The Greek title, Odysseia, simply means the story of Odysseus. Since the nineteenth century English has used “odyssey” for any long, eventful journey, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) carried the word into space. The ten years themselves are counted on how long it took Odysseus to get home.