Twelve ships left Troy under Odysseus. Somewhere between six and seven hundred men. Twenty years after he first sailed for the war, one man walked up the beach at Ithaca — asleep, put down on the sand by strangers, with everyone he'd commanded dead. That's the arithmetic of the Odyssey, and it's easy to lose track of it among the monsters. It is not an adventure story with a happy ending. It's a story about a man who wants one specific thing — to go home — and spends ten years watching everyone around him die because they wanted something else.
Why It Took Ten Years
The war was over and Odysseus had won it for them. He built the horse. Poseidon had backed the Greeks throughout and could easily have sent him home in a fortnight. Then Odysseus blinded Poseidon's son, and the sea closed. Everything that follows comes out of that one act, and out of what he says afterwards.
The First Two Stops
Ismarus. The fleet landed at a Thracian town and sacked it, which was normal practice. Then the men wouldn't leave — they stayed on the beach eating and drinking while the survivors went inland and came back with reinforcements. Odysseus lost seventy-two men, six from every ship, because his crew wouldn't get back on the boats. That's the pattern being established on page one. He gives an instruction. They ignore it. People die. The Lotus-Eaters. A storm blew them to a country of people who were entirely harmless, kind, and permanently content. They lived in a daydream and wanted nothing. Odysseus sent three men to see who lived there. The locals gave them the lotus to eat, and immediately they lost all desire to go home — no wish to see Ithaca, no interest in their wives or children. He had to physically drag them back and tie them under the benches while they wept. Nobody attacked anyone. It's the gentlest disaster in the poem and one of the more disturbing, because the danger is simply not wanting to leave. A lotus-eater still means someone lost in comfortable forgetfulness.
The Cyclops
Then they came to a green island opposite a mainland, and rested a day. Odysseus looked across the water and saw flocks and smoke from human fires, and decided to go and see what sort of people lived there. He didn't have to. Nobody made him. It's curiosity, and it costs him everything. The mainland belonged to the Cyclopes — giants with a single eye in the middle of the forehead, who kept sheep, farmed nothing, made no laws and had no assemblies. Each lived alone in a cave, and none of them cared what any of the others did. Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, lived in an enormous grotto with a walled yard. Odysseus took twelve men, a skin of exceptionally strong wine, and went in. The owner was out. The cave was full of penned lambs and kids, and racks of cheeses, and pails of milk and whey. The crew wanted to grab as much as they could carry and run for the ship. Odysseus said no. He wanted to meet the owner and see whether he'd offer them a guest-gift. That decision kills six of his men.
Inside
A shadow filled the doorway. Polyphemus drove his flocks in, threw down an armload of firewood, and rolled a boulder across the entrance — one so large that twenty-two wagons couldn't have shifted it. Then he milked the ewes, lit the fire, and saw them. What are you, he asked — traders or pirates? Odysseus answered as a Greek should: they were Achaeans of Agamemnon's army, blown off course, and they came as suppliants — and he reminded the giant that Zeus protects strangers and guests. Polyphemus laughed at him. Only a fool would tell him to worry about the gods; he did as he liked. Then he asked where the ship was. Odysseus lied instantly — wrecked, all lost, only us. Which is the one thing he does right in the cave, and it saves the fleet. Polyphemus picked up two of the men, killed them, ate them, and went to sleep.
The Plan
Odysseus's first instinct was to stab him in the night. He got as far as drawing the sword before working out the flaw: the boulder. Kill the giant and they'd be sealed in a cave with a corpse and starve. So he waited. Morning: two more men eaten, flocks out, boulder back. Trapped inside, he found a club of green olive-wood the size of a ship's mast. They cut off a length, sharpened it, hardened the point in the fire, and buried it under the floor litter. That evening: two more men. Then Odysseus came forward with the wine. Polyphemus, who had never drunk anything but milk, was astonished. He asked for more and offered a guest-gift in return, and asked his name. My name is Nobody. Then here's your gift, Nobody, said the giant. I'll eat you last. He passed out. They heated the stake, drove it into the eye, and turned it.
"Nobody Is Killing Me"
The scream brought the other Cyclopes to the mouth of the cave, calling in to ask what was wrong. Was someone attacking him? Was someone killing him by force or by trickery? Nobody! Nobody is killing me by treachery! Well, they said, if nobody is hurting you, it must be a sickness from Zeus, and you'd better pray about it. And they went home to bed. It's the oldest joke in Western literature and it's still funny.
Getting Out
Polyphemus rolled the stone away and sat in the doorway with his arms spread, feeling for anyone who tried to pass. So Odysseus roped the rams together in threes and slung a man under the middle one of each group, hidden by the animals on either side. He took the biggest ram himself and hung underneath it face-up, holding the fleece. At dawn the flock went out. Polyphemus felt along every back as they passed and found nothing. The great ram came last, and the giant stopped it and talked to it — his favourite, always first out, why so slow today? Was it sorry for its master's eye, that a worthless man called Nobody put out? And underneath it, holding on, was the worthless man.
The blinded giant checked the back of every animal as it left the cave, and never thought to feel underneath.
The One Thing He Couldn't Resist
They ran the flock to the ship and pushed off, and here Odysseus makes the mistake that costs him ten years. He couldn't leave without shouting. He hurled a taunt back across the water. Polyphemus tore off a piece of cliff and threw it at the sound; it nearly swamped them. The crew begged him to stop. He shouted again — and this time he gave his name: if anyone asks who blinded you, say it was Odysseus, son of Laertes, of Ithaca. And Polyphemus groaned and said an oracle had warned him this would happen, but he'd been waiting for some great warrior to come and overpower him — not a weakling like this. Then he lifted his hands and prayed to his father: Poseidon, grant that Odysseus never sees Ithaca again. Or if he must, let him come late, and badly, and alone, in a stranger's ship, and find trouble waiting in his own house. Every clause of that curse is granted exactly. The nameless man would have got home in weeks. He couldn't bear to be nobody, and it took him ten years.
Aeolus and the Bag of Winds
They came to Aeolia, home of the king of the winds. Aeolus was hospitable, kept them a month, and at their departure gave Odysseus a leather bag with every contrary wind tied up inside it, leaving only a favourable west wind to carry them home. Nine days they ran before it. On the tenth they could see Ithaca — close enough to make out men tending fires on the shore. Odysseus had held the sheet himself the whole way without sleeping. Now, with home in sight, he finally let go and slept. And his crew looked at the bag he'd been guarding and decided it was treasure he wasn't sharing. They opened it. Every wind in the world came out at once. The sea went white, the ships were driven back the way they'd come, and when Odysseus woke, Ithaca was gone off the horizon. Back to Aeolia. And Aeolus, when he heard, refused to help again: a man this hated by the gods was not someone he could assist. There is no crueller scene in the poem. Ten days of getting it right, undone by greed and about two minutes of sleep.
Nine sleepless days of steering, undone by a crew who assumed the leather bag was hidden treasure.
Laestrygonians, Circe, and the Underworld
The Laestrygonians were giant cannibals with a good harbour. Eleven of the twelve ships moored inside it and were destroyed with boulders from the cliffs, the men speared in the water like fish. Only Odysseus's own ship, which he'd tied up outside the harbour mouth — the one time his caution pays — got away. Twelve ships down to one. Circe, on Aeaea, turned half the remaining crew into pigs. Odysseus was protected by the herb moly, given to him by Hermes, and forced her to change them back. Then he stayed a year. At the end of it she told him he couldn't go home without first going to the edge of Hades to consult the dead prophet Tiresias. He went. And Peabody, tellingly, refuses to explain how — she says that by some mysterious journey and the aid of a spell he came to the borders of Hades, and leaves it at that. There he spoke with the dead: his own mother, who had died of grief waiting for him. Achilles, who told him he'd rather be a landless serf alive than king of all the dead. Ajax, who wouldn't speak to him at all. Agamemnon, still bitter about his wife, warning him to come home carefully. Tiresias gave him the prophecy: Poseidon's anger follows you. You will get home — but when you come to Thrinacia, where the cattle of the Sun graze, leave them alone. Harm them and your men are lost, and even if you survive, you'll come home to find strangers eating your property and courting your wife.
The Sirens
Circe briefed him on the route, and the first hazard was the Sirens — who sing so beautifully that every man who hears them steers towards them and dies on the rocks. Odysseus did something nobody else in mythology thinks of. He wanted to hear it. He plugged his crew's ears with wax and had himself lashed upright to the mast, with orders that if he begged to be released they were to tie him tighter. Peabody's account of what he heard is the best in English. A wild sweetness coaxing the air the way a musician coaxes a harp. Beautiful women sitting in a flowering meadow that hid the bones of men. Voices golden-sweet above the sound of wind and wave, like drops of amber floating on the tide. And they sang to him by name, which is the horror of it. They knew who he was. He fought the ropes and screamed at his men to let him go, and they couldn't hear him, and rowed harder. That's the image that has outlasted everything else: a man who knows what he wants and has arranged in advance to be prevented from getting it. Economists and psychologists now use "Ulysses contract" for exactly that manoeuvre — a binding commitment made by your sober self against your future self.
The only man who ever heard the Sirens and lived arranged, in advance, to be stopped from obeying them.
Scylla and Charybdis
Then a narrow strait with a cliff on one side and a whirlpool on the other. Charybdis sucked the whole sea down three times a day beneath a fig tree, and spat it back. Everything caught in it was lost. Scylla lived in a cave in the cliff: six necks, six heads, and a permanent appetite. Circe's advice was blunt and appalling. Steer close to Scylla. She will take six men. Go near Charybdis and you lose all of them. Odysseus did not tell his crew. They rowed under the cliff watching for the whirlpool, and Scylla came down and took six of them out of the middle of the ship — and Odysseus, looking up, saw them lifted into the air above him, still shouting his name. He says it was the most pitiful thing he saw in all his wandering, and he had been to the Trojan War. Between Scylla and Charybdis is now standard English for a choice between two disasters where avoiding one drives you into the other.
The Cattle of the Sun
They came to Thrinacia, and Odysseus — who had been warned twice, by Tiresias and by Circe — didn't even want to land. The crew were finished. They'd been rowing for weeks and had just watched six men eaten. They insisted, and swore they wouldn't touch the cattle. He made them take an oath. Then a storm blew for a month and pinned them there. They ate their stores, then fished and hunted, then started to starve. And one day, while Odysseus was inland, his second-in-command Eurylochus made an argument that is genuinely hard to refute: when we get home we'll build the Sun a temple and make it right, but I'd rather drown quickly than waste away slowly on this beach. They killed the cattle. Odysseus came back and found the meat on the fire. The moment the weather cleared and they sailed, Zeus struck the ship with a thunderbolt. Every man died except Odysseus, who clung to a piece of wreckage. He was now what Polyphemus had prayed for: alone.
Calypso
He drifted to Ogygia, the island of the nymph Calypso, and stayed seven years. She loved him. The island was beautiful. She kept him in comfort and sang to him while she wove at a golden loom — Peabody's image is that her voice was like a gold thread twisting in and out of silence, making it beautiful. And she offered him immortality. Eternal life, eternal youth, on a paradise island with a goddess. He turned it down. He sat on the shore every day and looked at the sea and cried. Homer says he slept with her at night because he had to, and spent every day wanting to leave. This is the centre of the whole poem. Odysseus is offered the thing every hero in Greek myth wants — an exemption from death — and he refuses it, in order to go back to a rocky island and a wife who is twenty years older than when he left. Peabody's phrasing: nothing could win his heart away from his own country and his own wife, nothing but Lethe itself, and no man may drink that till he dies. Athena eventually took his case to Zeus, and Hermes was sent to tell Calypso to release him. She agreed — Peabody notes she was kind-hearted, and that none of her graces had made him forget home — and helped him build a raft. Poseidon wrecked it. He swam for two days and came ashore, naked and half-dead, in the land of the Phaeacians.
Offered eternal life and eternal youth by a goddess, he spent seven years on the beach wanting to go home instead.
The Phaeacians
He was found on the beach by Nausicaa, a princess who had come down to the river to wash clothes and play ball with her maids. She gave him food and clothes and directions to her parents' palace, where he was taken in and fed and entertained without anyone asking who he was — which is xenia working exactly as it should, for the first time in the entire poem. Then, at the feast, the court singer performed a song about the Trojan War and the Wooden Horse. And Odysseus put his cloak over his head and cried. Only then did he tell them his name. The Phaeacians were the best sailors alive — Peabody says the ocean was to them what air is to a bird. They loaded him with gold and silver and put him on a ship, and he fell asleep before it cleared the harbour. They laid him on the shore of Ithaca still sleeping, stacked the treasure beside him, and left. After twenty years, he came home unconscious and didn't see it happen.
Ithaca: Penelope's Web
While all of this was going on, Penelope had been waiting. The kingdom had no king. She was clever and the property was valuable, and suitors had come from every island round about — over a hundred of them — and moved into the palace. Peabody's image is a plague of crickets. They ate their way through the estate, feasting daily at Odysseus's expense, and demanded that Penelope choose one of them. She couldn't refuse outright; there were too many of them and her son was a boy. So she stalled with a piece of work. She announced that she must first finish weaving a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes, so it would be ready when he died. It would be a disgrace to bury a great man without one. When it was done, she'd choose. She set up a great loom in the hall and wove all day, every day, in public. And every night she went back and unpicked what she'd done. Three years she got away with it, weaving a piece of cloth that never grew. The suitors never worked it out. Peabody's explanation is the driest joke in her whole book: for, being men, they knew nothing of women's handicraft, and it was all alike a marvel to them — both the beauty of the web and this endless toil in the making. In the fourth year a servant betrayed her, and it ended. Peabody adds something Homer doesn't quite say and that I think is the best line in her retelling: although Penelope believed her husband was dead, her hope would put out buds again and again — just as spring, which seems to die every year, comes back. Penelope's web still means a task deliberately never finished.
Woven in public every day and undone in secret every night, the shroud held a hundred suitors off for three years.
The Homecoming
Athena met Odysseus on the beach, disguised as a young shepherd, told him where he was, and then revealed herself and warned him not to go straight to the palace. She disguised him as an old beggar. He went first to the hut of Eumaeus, his swineherd, who took the stranger in and fed him and talked about how much he missed his old master. Telemachus, now grown and just back from a voyage looking for news of his father, arrived at the same hut — and there, with the door shut, Athena restored Odysseus's real appearance and father and son saw each other for the first time.
Argos
Then the beggar and the swineherd walked to the palace, and at the gate there was a dog lying on a dung heap. Argos. Odysseus had raised him as a puppy and left for Troy before he was trained. He was twenty years old, riddled with ticks, too weak to stand, ignored by everyone in a household that had stopped caring. He heard the voice, and lifted his head, and moved his tail. That was all he could do. Odysseus, in disguise and unable to react, turned his face away and wiped his eyes. And the dog — the only creature in Ithaca who recognised him, twenty years later, in disguise, on the strength of a voice — died that same day. Six lines in Homer. It is, by fairly common agreement, the most affecting passage in ancient literature.
The Bow
Inside, Odysseus was insulted and had food thrown at him by men eating his own livestock. He talked to Penelope without revealing himself, and told her news of her husband as any beggar might. Then Penelope, finally out of delays, set a contest. She brought out Odysseus's great bow and announced she would marry whichever suitor could string it and send an arrow through the line of twelve axe-heads. Telemachus had quietly removed every other weapon from the hall. The suitors tried, one after another. None of them could even bend the bow. They warmed it with fat to make the wood supple. It made no difference. Then the beggar asked to try, and was laughed at. Telemachus, apparently out of courtesy, handed it to him. He turned it over once, the way a musician checks an instrument, and strung it in a single movement. Then he plucked the string, and it sang. And he sent the arrow straight through all twelve rings.
A hundred men had failed to bend it. The beggar handled it like a musician checking an instrument.
And Then
Now for another mark — in his own voice. The second arrow killed the worst of the suitors. Telemachus came to his father's side, Eumaeus with him, and the doors were shut. It was short and total. Every suitor and every disloyal servant in the house.
Penelope
The old nurse Eurycleia ran upstairs to tell the queen her husband was home. And Penelope didn't believe her. She came down and sat opposite him and said nothing. She'd had twenty years of false news and she was not going to be wrong again. Even when Athena restored his appearance, she sat there in doubt — and her own son criticised her for it, and Odysseus was hurt. Homer gives her one more move, and it's the best thing in the poem. She tells the nurse to move the bed out of the bedroom for the stranger. And Odysseus loses his temper — because he built that bed himself, around a living olive tree still rooted in the ground, and it cannot be moved by anybody unless someone has cut through the trunk. Which only he and she and one servant ever knew. That's when she breaks. Peabody's line: her heart woke up and sang like a brook set free in spring. She had out-thought him one last time, and she needed to, because she'd been holding a household together against a hundred men for twenty years by being exactly that careful.
What the Odyssey Is About
Home over glory. He is offered immortality and refuses it. Achilles chose a short famous life; Odysseus chooses a long ordinary one, and Homer has Achilles' ghost tell him, from the Underworld, that Achilles now thinks he chose wrong. Intelligence as the heroic virtue. He wins nothing by strength. He wins by lying, disguising, waiting, and thinking two steps ahead — and Penelope, doing the same thing at home for twenty years without a single sword, is his equal, which the poem knows perfectly well. And the cost. Everyone who sailed with him is dead. Some through his errors, most through their own. He gets what he wanted, and he is the only one who does.
One More Thing
Athena spends much of the poem disguised as an old family friend of Odysseus, advising his son Telemachus. The friend's name is Mentor. That's where the word comes from.
