Odysseus' Journey Home

At a Glance

Central figures: Odysseus, cunning king of Ithaca, and his wife Penelope, who waits for him through ten years of siege and ten more of his wandering; also his son Telemachus, the god Poseidon who opposes him, and the goddess Athena who champions him.
Setting: The Mediterranean world - Troy, the island of the Cyclops, Circe’s island of Aeaea, the Underworld, Calypso’s island of Ogygia, and finally Ithaca; the decade following the fall of Troy, as told in Homer’s Odyssey.
The turn: Odysseus blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus and then, driven by pride, shouts his own name - giving Poseidon a name to curse.
The outcome: Poseidon hounds Odysseus across the sea for a decade, destroying his ships and his men one by one, until Odysseus reaches Ithaca alone and kills the suitors who have invaded his house.
The legacy: Odysseus reclaims his kingdom, his marriage, and his identity - though every man who sailed from Troy with him is dead.

Ten years the Greeks fought at Troy. Then the walls fell, the fires went up, and the victors put their oars in the water. Most of them made it home in a season. Odysseus did not reach Ithaca for another ten years, and when he did, he came alone, disguised as a beggar, with nothing left of the twelve ships and the hundreds of men who had sailed with him.

The god responsible was Poseidon. Before Odysseus sailed, he had blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus - and then, standing off in his ship, shouted his name across the water. Polyphemus reached up to his ruined eye, and prayed to his father the sea-god for revenge. Poseidon heard him. He would go on hearing him for a decade.

Polyphemus

The Cyclops was only the first monster, but he was the one that mattered. Polyphemus trapped Odysseus and his men in a cave behind a stone so large no human force could move it, and began eating them, two at a time. Odysseus sharpened a stake of olive wood, got the giant drunk on the strong wine he had brought from the ships, and drove the stake into the one eye while Polyphemus slept. When dawn came and the giant rolled the stone aside to let his flock out to pasture, Odysseus and his surviving men clung to the bellies of the sheep and passed unseen beneath his groping hands. It was well done. And then Odysseus ruined it - calling back from the water the name Polyphemus would carry to his father.

The Island of Circe and the House of the Dead

Circe, the sorceress who lived on Aeaea, turned the first men Odysseus sent ashore into swine. Hermes met Odysseus on his way to her hall and gave him the herb moly to protect him from her drugs. When her magic failed to work on him, Circe made terms. She restored his men, kept them all on her island for a year, and when the time came to leave, told Odysseus what lay ahead: the Sirens, the straits between Scylla and Charybdis, and the cattle of Helios. She also told him he must first sail to the edge of the world and consult the dead.

In the Underworld, Odysseus poured out blood offerings and waited. The shades came - men he had known, enemies, strangers - and among them the prophet Tiresias, who told him what remained: more suffering, one more sea, the cattle he must not touch. Odysseus listened. He also saw his mother there, dead while he was away, and learned his household in Ithaca was still holding.

The Sirens, Scylla, and the Cattle of Helios

Circe’s warnings were exact. Past the Sirens - whose singing promised knowledge and delivered death - Odysseus had himself lashed to the mast while his crew rowed with their ears stopped with beeswax. He heard the song. He lived. The ship passed on.

The strait between Scylla and Charybdis was worse. Charybdis was a whirlpool that could swallow a ship whole. Scylla was a cliff-creature with six heads, each on a long neck, each with three rows of teeth. Odysseus steered toward Scylla. Six men went up from the oar benches into those mouths. He did not stop rowing.

Then they made landfall on the island of Helios, the sun god, and Odysseus ordered his men not to touch the sacred cattle. He should have kept sailing. Instead he let them rest, and while he slept his men slaughtered the cattle and ate them. Helios demanded punishment. Zeus sent a lightning bolt that cracked the ship apart. Every man drowned. Odysseus clung to wreckage for nine days and washed ashore on Ogygia, the island of Calypso.

Seven Years with Calypso

The nymph Calypso kept Odysseus for seven years. She offered him immortality if he stayed. He refused. He sat on the shore each day looking at the sea. Finally Athena pressed Zeus, who sent Hermes to tell Calypso to let him go. She did, reluctantly, and helped him build a raft and pointed him toward Ithaca. Poseidon saw him on the water and smashed the raft with a storm. Odysseus swam for two days until a Phaeacian shore took him in. The Phaeacians, great sailors, put him on a ship sleeping and left him on a beach in Ithaca at dawn.

The Bow

Odysseus arrived home as a beggar. The suitors - over a hundred of them, nobles from across the islands - had been occupying his hall for years, eating through his stores, pressing Penelope to choose a husband. His son Telemachus knew him. A handful of loyal servants knew him. The rest did not.

The test came on the day Penelope set out Odysseus’ great bow and announced she would marry whoever could string it and shoot an arrow clean through a row of twelve axe-heads. One by one the suitors tried and failed. The old beggar in the corner asked to try. The suitors laughed. He strung it without apparent effort, sighted down the shaft, and put the arrow through all twelve axes.

Then he turned the bow on the suitors.

With Telemachus beside him and two faithful servants at the doors, Odysseus killed every man in the hall. When it was done, Penelope came down. She had heard that her husband was home and had killed the suitors, and she was not persuaded. She told her servants to move the marriage bed outside, to make it ready for a guest. Odysseus stopped her - the bed couldn’t be moved, he said; one of its posts was a living olive tree rooted in the ground, and he had built the chamber around it. No one else could know that. Penelope came to him then, and after twenty years, the house was his again.