The Odyssey

Ithaca hidden from the man who reached it

Odysseus is asleep when the Phaeacians land him at the harbour of Phorcys, and arrival gives him no knowledge of where he is. Athena’s mist covers the country. He cannot recognise the island that is the poem’s destination for him.

Athena identifies the harbour, an olive tree, the cave of the Naiads and wooded Neriton before Ithaca becomes visible to Odysseus as his own land. He kisses the earth. The scene establishes the first limit of homecoming: a man may reach his country before he knows that he has reached it.

That difficulty is present from the opening lines, where the Muse is asked to tell of the man who travels after Troy. His crew die after eating the cattle of Helios, Calypso detains him and the gods decide that he must return to Ithaca while Poseidon resists. The destination is fixed early. What counts as reaching it remains open.

Why Odysseus tells his story late

The opening states the costs of Odysseus’s travels before it gives his account of them. His losses, detention and contested return are already known when he takes over as the first-person narrator of his wanderings in Book 9. He begins after Troy with the raid on the Cicones.

The adventures therefore enter the poem as an account of past events, told by Odysseus while his return to Ithaca is still incomplete. His voice can explain the years since Troy. Recognition on Ithaca requires other evidence.

Gregory Nagy placed the Iliad and Odyssey within oral traditions in which composition and performance were linked, and traced the later restriction of Homer’s name to these two poems. In the surviving arrangement, Odysseus begins his own account only after the poem has declared his destination and the cost.

How the household recognises him

Recognition begins unevenly. In Book 19, Penelope continues speaking with Odysseus as a stranger while Eurycleia recognises the boar-tusk scar on his body. The nurse knows him through a mark on his skin, but his wife does not. Recognition within the household remains incomplete.

Penelope then sets the contest of the bow and axes. Odysseus alone strings the bow and sends an arrow through all 12 axes. The feat distinguishes him from every other competitor, but Penelope’s test is different. She requires knowledge that strength and skill cannot provide.

She tests the returned man by speaking of their bed as though it could be moved, and Odysseus answers by describing how he made it. One bedpost is a living olive, rooted inside the house, and the structure was built around it. The private knowledge proves his identity to Penelope.

Eurycleia’s evidence is bodily. The bow displays a capacity no other competitor possesses, while Penelope’s test depends on the private history of a fixed object in their house. Each proof answers a different doubt. Penelope recognises Odysseus only when he can describe the bed that cannot be carried out of the house.

Where the surviving poem ends

The recognition between Penelope and Odysseus supplies one possible endpoint. Ancient scholia reported that Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus treated Odyssey 23.296 as the poem’s end, although both editors retained the lines that follow and Book 24 in their texts. Their judgement records a preference about where the poem could end, alongside a surviving text that continues.

That continuation extends the homecoming beyond the rooted bed. In Book 24, the relatives of the suitors take up arms, and Ithaca faces another fight after Odysseus has been recognised at home. The homecoming now depends upon stopping conflict among the Ithacans.

The gods decided in Book 1 that Odysseus must return. At the end, Athena stops the fighting and establishes a covenant on Ithaca.