Odyssey

On Ithaca, Odysseus¹'s son Telemachus³ has grown into a helpless young man, watching over a hundred boorish suitors devour his household while pressing his mother Penelope² to remarry and surrender the kingdom. A dignified visitor named Mentes⁴ arrives, catches a hurled apple core without flinching, and privately urges Telemachus³ to stop moping: he must assert himself, then sail to seek news of his father.

The next morning Telemachus³ wakes transformed, radiant with new authority, and realizes Mentes was the goddess Athena⁴ in disguise. He confronts the suitors, secures a ship through his tutor Mentor (Athena again),⁴ and, over Penelope²'s tearful fears, departs Ithaca for the first time in his life to learn whether Odysseus¹ lives or is dead.

Telemachus³ sails to sandy Pylos, where the ancient King Nestor¹³ welcomes him warmly but has no news, then sends him overland to Sparta with Nestor¹³'s cheerful son Peisistratus. There, amid the golden splendor of King Menelaus¹¹ and Helen,¹² now reconciled after Troy, Telemachus³ finally hears substance.

Menelaus¹¹ recounts how, marooned in Egypt, he wrestled the shape-shifting sea god Proteus, who revealed the fates of the returning Greeks: Ajax drowned, Agamemnon⁶ murdered, and Odysseus¹ alive but imprisoned on a distant island by the lovesick nymph Calypso,¹⁰ with no ship and no way home. Helen¹² and Menelaus¹¹ assure the weeping young man that his father, though captive, still lives and still dreams of Ithaca.

On the paradise island of Ogygia, Odysseus¹ has spent seven years as Calypso¹⁰'s captive lover, doing his duty in her bed by night but weeping on the shore by day, his mind永 fixed on Ithaca. Prodded by Athena,⁴ Zeus dispatches Hermes to order the nymph¹⁰ to release him. Calypso¹⁰ rages at the double standard that lets gods take mortal lovers while denying her hers, but yields.

She offers Odysseus¹ immortality and eternal youth if he stays; he refuses, declaring that his aging wife Penelope,² worn by care, means more to him than any deathless beauty. Weeping, Calypso¹⁰ helps him build a raft, provisions it, and sends the man she loves back toward the sea and home.

For seventeen days Odysseus¹ sails alone under the stars toward the Phaeacian island of Scheria. But Poseidon,²² absent when Zeus decreed the release and still enraged over an old injury to his son,¹⁸ spots him and churns the sea into chaos. Lightning splits the mast; Odysseus¹ clings to wreckage, momentarily welcoming death over endless torment.

The compassionate sea goddess Leucothea surfaces and gives him her immortal veil, telling him to strip, abandon the raft, and swim, then cast the veil back once ashore. After two days battling the waves, bruised and clinging to slick rocks, he drags himself up a river mouth and collapses naked in the reeds, more dead than alive on an unknown shore.

A leather ball, thrown by girls at play, wakes the beached castaway.¹ The princess Nausicaa,²³ doing laundry with her maids, stands her ground as the wild, salt-scoured stranger emerges clutching a branch to cover himself. Charmed and moved, she feeds and clothes him, then directs him to approach her mother, Queen Arete, at the palace of the Phaeacians.

Received with generous hospitality by King Alcinous, the still-unnamed guest weeps when the court bard Demodocus sings of Troy. Pressed, he stops the song, declaring the poet tells it wrong because he himself was there: he is Odysseus¹ of Ithaca. The astonished court falls silent, and he begins the long tale of everything that befell him since the war.

Odysseus¹ recounts his voyage. After a costly raid on the Cicones and a monster storm, his fleet reached the land of the Lotus-Eaters, whose narcotic fruit erased his scouts' desire for home; he dragged the drugged men back and lashed them to the benches. Worse came at the island of the Cyclopes.

Curious, Odysseus¹ led twelve men into the cave of Polyphemus,¹⁸ a one-eyed giant son of Poseidon,²² who sealed them in and devoured them two at a time. Odysseus¹ got the giant¹⁸ drunk on strong wine, told him his name was Nobody, and drove a fire-hardened stake into his single eye. Clinging beneath the rams, the survivors escaped, but Odysseus¹ boastfully shouted his true name, earning Poseidon²²'s ruinous curse.

Odysseus¹'s tale continues. King Aeolus, keeper of the winds, hosted him a month and gave him a leather bag trapping every wind but the gentle one that would blow him home. After nine days, with Ithaca's smoke visible on the horizon, Odysseus¹ fell asleep; his resentful crew, suspecting hidden treasure, opened the bag and released a hurricane that flung them all the way back to Aeolia.

This time Aeolus turned them away, certain the gods hated them. Rowing on, they reached the Laestrygonians, savage giants who hurled boulders to smash eleven of the twelve ships and speared the crews like fish for eating. Only Odysseus¹'s own vessel escaped, the proud fleet reduced to a single ship of survivors.

Odysseus¹ recounts reaching Aeaea, where the enchantress Circe¹⁹ turned a scouting party into pigs. Warned and armed by Hermes with the herb moly, Odysseus¹ resisted her potion, held a sword to her throat, and made her swear an oath before becoming her lover; she restored his men and hosted them for a year.

When the crew begged to leave, Circe¹⁹ revealed he must first sail to the underworld and consult the blind prophet Tiresias. At the grove of the dead, Odysseus¹ poured blood to summon the shades: the prophet foretold his path and final fate, his mother Anticlea told him grief for him had killed her, and the ghost of Agamemnon⁶ warned him to trust no woman while broken Achilles declared he would rather be a poor man's slave than king of the dead.

Odysseus¹ finishes his story. Guided by Circe,¹⁹ he plugged his crew's ears with wax and had himself lashed to the mast to hear the Sirens' song, which promised knowledge of all things and nearly drove him to break free. Steering between the whirlpool Charybdis and the six-headed cliff-monster Scylla, he chose Scylla and watched, helplessly, as she plucked six screaming men from the deck.

On the island of Thrinacia, starving and storm-trapped, his crew ignored his warnings and slaughtered the immortal cattle of the sun god Helios. In vengeance Zeus destroyed their ship with a thunderbolt, drowning every man. Odysseus¹ alone survived, drifting to Ogygia and Calypso,¹⁰ thus closing the tale the Phaeacians have been hearing all night.

Back in the interwoven saga of the cursed house, Agamemnon⁶'s son Orestes,⁷ raised in exile with his beloved cousin Pylades,⁹ consults the oracle at Delphi and is commanded by Apollo to avenge his father. He and Pylades⁹ travel secretly to Mycenae, where his sister Electra,⁸ seething at their mother's crime, helps plot the deed.

Using a false report of Orestes⁷'s own death to gain entry, they cut down the usurper Aegisthus, then Orestes,⁷ hands shaking, drives his sword into Clytemnestra⁵ as Electra⁸ urges him on. The moment the matricide is done, Orestes⁷ begins to see them: the Furies, ancient spirits of blood vengeance, rising to torment him, driving him toward madness for the unnatural crime he committed at a god's command.

To end his torment, Orestes⁷ is sent by the oracle to Athens, where Athena⁴ has assembled twelve mortal judges on the Hill of Ares to hear his case, the first such court in history. Pylades⁹ argues that Orestes⁷ acted on Apollo's direct command; Erigone, daughter of the slain Clytemnestra⁵ and Aegisthus, counters brilliantly that Orestes⁷ should have broken the cycle of vengeance by seeking open judgment rather than private slaughter.

The jurors split six to six. Athena⁴ casts the deciding vote for mercy and acquits Orestes,⁷ establishing that citizens, not kings or gods, should judge one another, with ties always falling to compassion. She transforms the raging Furies into the Kindly Ones, guardians of Athenian justice.

The Phaeacians ferry the sleeping Odysseus¹ to Ithaca and heap treasure beside him. He wakes disoriented until Athena⁴ appears, confirms he is home, and disguises him as an aged beggar so he can reconnoiter without being killed. He goes first to his loyal swineherd Eumaeus,¹⁴ who unknowingly hosts and defends his own master, praising the lost king.

Athena⁴ fetches Telemachus³ safely home past the suitors' ambush; at the hut, father and son are reunited, Odysseus¹ shedding his disguise to embrace the boy he left as a baby. Together they plot the suitors' downfall, agreeing to hide the palace weapons and reveal nothing to Penelope.² Odysseus¹ enters his own hall as a beggar, mocked and pelted, quietly counting his enemies.

Prompted by conversation with the disguised stranger,¹ Penelope² announces a contest: she will marry whichever suitor can string Odysseus¹'s great horn bow and shoot an arrow through twelve aligned axe-heads. One by one the suitors fail, unable even to bend the weapon; Antinous¹⁵ proposes postponing to pray to Apollo. The scorned beggar¹ asks to try, and over the suitors' jeers Telemachus³ insists he be allowed.

Odysseus¹ strings the bow effortlessly, like a musician fitting a lyre string, and sends an arrow cleanly through all twelve axe-heads. Meanwhile, at his signal, the loyal nurse Euryclea,²⁰ who earlier recognized him by an old boar-scar, bolts the hall's doors, and the cowherd Philoetius seals the gates, trapping the suitors inside.

His first arrow after the contest kills Antinous¹⁵ through the throat. Declaring himself Odysseus¹ returned from the dead, he rains arrows on the trapped suitors while Telemachus,³ Eumaeus,¹⁴ and Philoetius fight beside him with spear and shield; the treacherous goatherd Melanthius is caught and strung up.

Every one of the hundred-plus suitors is killed, though the bard Phemius and herald Medon are spared at Telemachus³'s plea. When the hall is cleansed, Penelope,² cautious after twenty years, refuses to accept the stranger until she tests him: she orders their marriage bed moved.

Odysseus¹ erupts, revealing he built that bed himself around a living olive tree, immovable, their secret. Only he could know it. Weeping with joy, Penelope² embraces her husband,¹ and the long homecoming is complete.