The Odyssey

A poem about coming home

The Odyssey is an ancient Greek epic, a long poem about heroes. It tells of the return of Odysseus from the war at Troy to his home on Ithaca. It is one of the two epics, with the Iliad, to which Homer’s name was in time limited.

Modern scholars place the Iliad and Odyssey within oral traditions. In these, poems were passed on by word of mouth, and composing a poem and performing it went together. Some have also traced how Homer’s name later came to be limited to these two poems.

The poem’s destination is fixed from the opening lines. There the Muse, the goddess the poet calls on for his song, is asked to tell of the man who travels after Troy. His crew die after eating the cattle of the god Helios. The goddess Calypso holds him back. The gods decide that he must return to Ithaca, while the god Poseidon works against it. Where he is going is clear early. What counts as reaching it stays open.

Why Odysseus tells his story late

The opening states what his travels cost before it gives his own account of them. His losses, his detention and his disputed return are already known when he takes over the story in Book 9. From there he tells his wanderings himself, in the first person. He begins after Troy, with the raid on the Cicones.

So the adventures enter the poem as past events. Odysseus tells them while his return to Ithaca is still unfinished. His voice can explain the years since Troy. Being recognised on Ithaca will need other evidence.

Ithaca hidden from the man who reached it

Odysseus is asleep when the Phaeacians land him at the harbour of Phorcys. Arriving does not tell him where he is. A mist sent by the goddess Athena covers the country. He cannot recognise the island he has been travelling towards.

Athena points out the harbour, an olive tree, the cave of the Naiads and wooded Neriton. Only then does Odysseus see Ithaca as his own land. He kisses the earth. The scene sets the first limit on coming home: a man may reach his country before he knows that he has reached it.

How the household recognises him

Recognition comes unevenly. In Book 19, his wife Penelope goes on speaking with Odysseus as if he were a stranger. Meanwhile Eurycleia, his nurse, recognises the scar a boar’s tusk left on his body. The nurse knows him by a mark on his skin, but his wife does not.

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 sets him apart from every other competitor. But Penelope needs knowledge that strength and skill cannot give.

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

Each proof answers a different doubt. Eurycleia’s evidence is the body. The bow shows a skill no other competitor has. Penelope’s test depends on the private history of a fixed object in their house. She recognises Odysseus only when he can describe the bed that cannot be carried out of the house.

Where the surviving poem ends

The reunion of Penelope and Odysseus is one possible ending. Scholia, notes written by ancient scholars, report that the editors Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus treated Odyssey 23.296 as the end of the poem. Yet both kept the lines that follow, and Book 24, in their texts. Their judgement records a view about where the poem could end, beside a surviving text that goes on.

That continuation carries the homecoming past the rooted bed. In Book 24, the relatives of Penelope’s suitors take up arms. Ithaca faces another fight after Odysseus has been recognised at home. His homecoming now depends on ending the conflict among the people of Ithaca.

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