The Odyssey: summary book by book

The Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια, is a long poem about Odysseus, king of the small island of Ithaca. After the Greeks win the Trojan War, he sets off for home, but the sea god Poseidon is angry with him, and the journey takes ten years. He loses his ships and all his men. At home, his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus wait for him. He has now been away for twenty years, and many young nobles, the suitors, have moved into his palace: they eat his food and want Penelope to marry one of them.

The poem opens with the words «ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, Μοῦσα, πολύτροπον», “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns”, and its great theme is the homecoming, the νόστος. The ancient Greeks said the poet was Homer, but who Homer was, and whether one poet composed both the Iliad and the Odyssey, is still debated. The poem grew out of a long tradition of oral song and probably took its form in the 8th century BC, though some scholars date it later. It has more than 12,000 lines, and scholars in Alexandria later divided it into 24 books.

The poem does not start with Odysseus. In Books 1–4, often called the Telemachy, the gods agree that he may at last go home. The goddess Athena visits Telemachus in disguise and urges him to look for news of his father. Telemachus stands up to the suitors in the assembly of Ithaca, then sails to Pylos, where old Nestor welcomes him, and to Sparta, where Menelaus and Helen tell him what they know. Meanwhile the suitors plan to ambush him on his way back.

In Book 5 we meet Odysseus at last, on the island of the nymph Calypso, who has kept him there for seven years. Zeus sends Hermes to order his release. Odysseus builds a raft, but Poseidon wrecks it, and he swims ashore on Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians. In Books 6–8 the princess Nausicaa finds him near the shore, and King Alcinous and Queen Arete welcome him as a guest before they even know his name. This is ξενία, the sacred duty of hospitality. At a feast the singer Demodocus sings of the wooden horse of Troy, Odysseus weeps, and the king asks him who he is.

In Books 9–12 Odysseus himself tells the Phaeacians about his wanderings since Troy, in a long flashback. Many of the best-known scenes of the poem come from these four books.

• Book 9: the Cicones, then the Lotus-eaters, whose sweet fruit makes men forget their journey home, and the Cyclops Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant who eats six of his men. Odysseus makes him drunk with strong wine, tells him his name is Οὖτις, “Nobody”, and blinds him. Polyphemus is Poseidon’s son: this is why the god hates Odysseus.
• Book 10: Aeolus gives him a bag of winds, but the crew opens it; the Laestrygonians destroy every ship but his own; the witch Circe turns some of his men into pigs.
• Book 11: at the edge of the world of the dead he speaks with the prophet Tiresias, with his mother and with Achilles.
• Book 12: he hears the Sirens while tied to the mast, and passes between Scylla and Charybdis. On the island of the sun god Helios his hungry men eat the sacred cattle, and Zeus destroys their ship. Only Odysseus survives, and he drifts to Calypso’s island.

In Book 13 the Phaeacians carry Odysseus home while he sleeps. Athena disguises him as an old beggar, so that he can test his household. In Books 14–16 he stays with his loyal swineherd Eumaeus, and Telemachus, back from Sparta, avoids the ambush. Father and son recognise each other and plan their revenge. Telemachus counts the suitors: 108 young men from Ithaca and the nearby islands.

In Books 17–20 the beggar enters his own palace. His old dog Argos knows him, wags his tail and dies. The suitors mock him and throw things at him. Penelope talks with the stranger without recognising him, but the old nurse Eurycleia recognises a scar on his leg. In Book 21 Penelope sets a contest: she will marry the man who can string Odysseus’s bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axes. Only the beggar can do it. In Book 22 Odysseus, with Telemachus and two loyal herdsmen, kills the suitors. In Book 23 Penelope tests him with a secret only the two of them share: their bed, made from the trunk of a living olive tree. In Book 24 he meets his old father Laertes, the suitors’ families rise against him, and Athena makes peace. The action of the whole poem lasts only about six weeks.