Odyssey

The Odyssey is built on two lines that meet in its second half. In Ithaca, Penelope and Telemachus are besieged by suitors who want the throne and the queen; Athena encourages Telemachus to sail in search of news of his father. Meanwhile Odysseus is a prisoner of the nymph Calypso, and when he finally reaches the Phaeacians he tells the story of his wanderings at their feast.

The poem turns “going home” into a longer and harder test than the war itself. Odysseus survives not mainly by force but by intelligence, endurance, and the control of his own name. He invents false identities and false histories, and only at the end does he prove who he is with secrets that no impostor could know.

• Books I–IV: the council of the gods; Athena visits Telemachus; the assembly in Ithaca; Telemachus travels to Pylos and Sparta for news of Odysseus.
• Books V–VIII: Calypso releases Odysseus; he is shipwrecked; Nausicaa and the Phaeacians receive him; the blind bard Demodocus sings of Troy.
• Books IX–XII: Odysseus tells his own story: the Cyclops, the bag of winds, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and the cattle of Helios.
• Books XIII–XXIV: return to Ithaca; reunion with Eumaeus and Telemachus; the beggar in his own hall; the scar and the bow; the killing of the suitors; recognition by Penelope; reconciliation with the suitors’ families.

The Odyssey is the companion and the opposite of the Iliad. Where the Iliad pursues kléos, the Odyssey pursues nóstos. Odysseus refuses Calypso’s offer of immortality and chooses a mortal wife and a mortal home. He also shouts his own name to the Cyclops, and that boast brings Poseidon’s curse. A name is both glory and liability.

xenía is the other structural theme. The Phaeacians treat a stranger well and are saved; the suitors consume a host’s goods and abuse a beggar, and are killed; the Cyclops eats his guests and is blinded. The poem uses a series of host–guest encounters to test whether a society is still worth continuing.

• Odysseus: king of Ithaca, the man of many turns, intelligence and endurance personified.
• Penelope: the faithful and clever wife who holds off the suitors by weaving and unweaving a shroud.
• Telemachus: the son who grows from a hesitant boy into his father’s ally.
• Athena: patron of both Odysseus and Telemachus.
• Polyphemus, Circe, and Calypso: the monsters and temptations of the wandering.
• Antinous: the most arrogant of the suitors, and the first to die.