What happens in the Odyssey: Odysseus's ten years home

What the poem describes

The Odyssey is a Greek epic poem about Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and his journey home after the Trojan War, the setting of Homer's earlier epic, the Iliad. Composed in Homeric Greek and rooted in oral storytelling tradition, the poem is usually dated to around the 8th or 7th century BCE. It survives complete in 24 books, following Odysseus's wife, Penelope, and son, Telemachus, in Ithaca alongside Odysseus's own struggle to get home against the anger of the sea god Poseidon.

Where to read the Odyssey

The poem is long out of copyright. Samuel Butler's English prose translation is free on Project Gutenberg, and the Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University has the Greek text with an English translation (both are in the sources below).

Telemachus goes looking for his father

The poem opens nearly twenty years after Odysseus left for Troy, with more than a hundred suitors occupying his house, courting Penelope and consuming his estate while she delays choosing among them. Guided by the goddess Athena in disguise, Telemachus calls an assembly in Ithaca, then sails to Pylos and Sparta to ask the old warriors Nestor and Menelaus for news of his father. Menelaus tells him Odysseus is alive, held on the island of the nymph Calypso, unable to leave.

The tales Odysseus tells

Released by Calypso after seven years, Odysseus is shipwrecked and washes up among the Phaeacians, a seafaring people whose king, Alcinous, and princess, Nausicaa, receive him hospitably. At a feast, Odysseus tells the court who he is and recounts the adventures that filled the years since Troy fell: the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom he blinds and escapes by hiding his men under sheep, and the enchantress Circe, who turns his crew into pigs before becoming his host for a year.

He also describes sailing past the deadly-voiced Sirens, bound to his ship's mast so that he can hear their song and live; steering between the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, losing six men to Scylla; and traveling to the land of the dead, where he speaks with the prophet Teiresias and the shade of Achilles.

The return to Ithaca

The Phaeacians carry the sleeping Odysseus home to Ithaca and set him ashore with gifts. Athena disguises him as an old beggar so he can approach unrecognized, and he is reunited first with the swineherd Eumaeus, then with Telemachus, with whom he plots revenge on the suitors. Only his old dog, Argos, recognizes him on sight, wagging his tail before dying.

Penelope, still unconvinced her husband is alive, announces a contest: she will marry whichever suitor can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads. Every suitor fails; the disguised Odysseus alone succeeds, then turns the bow on the suitors and, with Telemachus and two loyal herdsmen, kills them all. Penelope tests him with their bed: when she orders it moved, he protests that it cannot be, because he built it around a living olive tree, a detail only Odysseus would know, and she accepts that he has come home.

How the versions differ

Homer's poems were composed for oral performance and, most scholars believe, dictated and written down in the second half of the 8th century BCE. Rulers in Athens helped organize the books in the 6th century BCE, and scholars at Alexandria, chiefly Zenodotus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace, produced the standardized Greek text still used as the basis for translations, weeding out variant lines that had crept into earlier copies.

English translations have multiplied since George Chapman's version was published in 1614. Samuel Butler's English prose translation and A.T. Murray's two-volume Greek-and-English edition, published in 1919, both remain freely available today. In 2017, Emily Wilson published the first complete English translation of the poem by a woman, spending five years on a version in iambic pentameter that favored plain, contemporary language over what she called "bombastic, archaic" diction.

How scholars explain it

Since the 19th century, debate over who composed the Odyssey and how has been called the Homeric Question. Most classicists now treat the poem as the product of a long oral tradition, built from stock phrases and scenes that generations of performers could adapt and recombine, rather than the work of a single author writing from scratch. Whether a poet named Homer existed as an individual, and how the Iliad and Odyssey relate to each other, remains debated.

The poem's status as myth rather than history is a separate question from its authorship. Odysseus's individual adventures, the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the journey to the land of the dead, belong to the realm of folklore rather than historical record. Real or Legend files this record as disputed: the dispute concerns whether Odysseus's ten-year voyage happened as described, not whether the Odyssey itself is a genuine and foundational poem.

Later retellings

Wilson's 2017 translation was widely reviewed as a fresh, modern rendering of an old text, credited with correcting what she described as unexamined gender bias in earlier translations by men. Her work, and the steady stream of new English translations that came before and after it, show how each generation retells the Odyssey in its own language, while leaving the underlying Greek text, and the disputed question of what in it is literally true, unchanged.