Odysseus's Journey Home: The Odyssey's Route and Return

The Odyssey is the story of one man's attempt to get home after the Trojan War, and it is far stranger in structure than most retellings suggest. The famous adventures, the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, take up only four of its twenty-four books, and Odysseus tells them himself, at a royal banquet, years after they happened.

This guide maps the journey and the return using Samuel Butler's prose translation (1900). One warning before you open it: Butler uses Roman names throughout, so Odysseus is Ulysses, Athena is Minerva, Poseidon is Neptune, Zeus is Jove and Hermes is Mercury. This guide uses the Greek names.

How the poem is built

The Odyssey starts near the end of the story and fills in the past later:

• Books 1 to 4: The gods meet in council. Athena visits Ithaca, where suitors are eating up Odysseus's household while courting his wife, Penelope. His son Telemachus sails to Pylos to see Nestor and to Sparta to see Menelaus, looking for news of his father.
• Book 5: Zeus sends Hermes to the nymph Calypso, who has been keeping Odysseus on her island. He leaves on a raft and is wrecked, and reaches Scheria, land of the Phaeacians.
• Books 6 to 8: The princess Nausicaa finds him, and he is welcomed at the palace of King Alcinous.
• Books 9 to 12: Odysseus tells the Phaeacians the story of his wanderings.
• Books 13 to 24: The Phaeacians carry him home to Ithaca, where he plots and takes revenge on the suitors.

Why he cannot get home

The poem gives the reason in Book 1. Zeus tells Athena that Poseidon "is still furious with Ulysses for having blinded an eye of Polyphemus king of the Cyclopes," who is Poseidon's son. Poseidon will not kill Odysseus outright, but he keeps him from getting home.

There is a second cause. The ghost of the prophet Teiresias warns Odysseus that if his men harm the cattle of the Sun on the island of Thrinacia, his ship and crew will be destroyed. That prophecy shapes everything that follows.

The route, stop by stop

In Books 9 to 12, Odysseus describes the stages of his voyage in this order:

• The Cicons: he sacks their town, and the Cicons living inland strike back.
• The Lotus-eaters: those of his men who eat the lotus stop caring about home, and he drags them back to the ships in tears.
• The Cyclops Polyphemus: trapped in the giant's cave, Odysseus gets him drunk and tells him "my name is Noman," then blinds him and escapes. This is the act that earns Poseidon's anger.
• Aeolus, keeper of the winds: he gives Odysseus the winds tied up in a hide sack. Within sight of home, the crew open it, thinking it holds gold and silver, and the storm blows them back.
• The Laestrygonians: man-eaters who wreck the fleet in a harbor with rocks hurled from the cliffs. Only Odysseus's own ship, moored outside, escapes.
• Circe: she turns his scouting party into pigs. With an herb from Hermes that the gods call Moly, Odysseus resists her magic, and the crew stay with her "a whole twelvemonth."
• The land of the dead (Book 11): Odysseus consults Teiresias, who gives the warning about the cattle of the Sun.
• The Sirens: following Circe's advice, he plugs his men's ears with wax and has himself tied to the mast so he can listen safely.
• Scylla and Charybdis: to avoid the whirlpool Charybdis, the ship hugs Scylla's side, and she snatches "my six best men."
• Thrinacia: storm-bound and starving, the crew kill the Sun's cattle. Zeus strikes the ship with a thunderbolt, and only Odysseus survives, lashed to the mast and keel.

After nine days adrift he reaches Calypso's island, Ogygia. He tells the Phaeacians, "I stayed with Calypso seven years straight on end," until she let him go.

Home in disguise

The Phaeacians land Odysseus on Ithaca while he is fast asleep. On their way home, Poseidon turns their ship to stone. Athena disguises Odysseus as an old beggar, covering him with wrinkles, and the homecoming that follows is a series of recognitions:

• Book 16: he reveals himself to Telemachus at the hut of the loyal swineherd Eumaeus.
• Book 17: his old dog, Argos, lying neglected on a dung heap, knows him at once, wags his tail, and dies "as soon as he had recognised his master."
• Book 19: his old nurse, Euryclea, washing his feet, recognizes a scar on his leg. He tells her to keep quiet, "now that after twenty years of wandering I am at last come to my own home again."
• Book 21: Penelope sets a contest. Whoever can string Odysseus's bow and shoot through twelve axes will win her hand. Only the disguised Odysseus can do it.
• Book 22: with Telemachus and two loyal herdsmen, Eumaeus and Philoetius, he kills the suitors.
• Book 23: Penelope tests him one last time, asking for their bed to be moved. Odysseus explodes: he built that bed himself around the stump of a living olive tree, so no one could move it. "When she heard the sure proofs," Penelope breaks down and embraces him.

Book 24 ends with the people of Ithaca coming out to attack Odysseus, until Athena concludes a peace.

How did Odysseus die? The sources disagree

The Odyssey itself never shows his death, only a prophecy. In Book 11, Teiresias tells him to carry an oar inland until he meets people who know nothing of the sea, and then says: "death shall come to you from the sea, and your life shall ebb away very gently when you are full of years and peace of mind."

The Telegony, a lost epic summarized by the ancient writer Proclus (in Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation), tells a much darker story. Odysseus has a son, Telegonus, by Circe. Searching for his father, Telegonus lands on Ithaca and raids it; Odysseus comes out to defend his island and "is killed by his son unwittingly." Telegonus then takes the body, with Penelope and Telemachus, to Circe's island, where Circe makes them immortal. Another fragment in the same collection says the Telegony also gave Odysseus a son by Calypso.

The later handbook known as the Library of Apollodorus adds a grim detail that ties the two accounts together. Telegonus wounds Odysseus with a spear "barbed with the spine of a sting-ray." Its translator, Sir James George Frazer (1921), notes that this death is "foreshadowed in the prophecy of Tiresias that his death would come from the sea."

Butler himself adds a quirk worth knowing. In his notes he argues that the Odyssey was written by a woman, a theory set out in his book The Authoress of the Odyssey. He admits in his preface that he does not pretend "to think that scholars generally acquiesce" in his conclusions. Read those notes as one translator's opinion, not settled fact.

Tips for a first reading

• Read Books 9 to 12 first if you only want the adventures, then go back to Book 1 for the full story.
• Keep a list of Roman-to-Greek names beside you if you use Butler's translation.
• Watch for the theme of hospitality. The poem keeps contrasting good hosts, like the Phaeacians and Eumaeus, with bad ones, like the Cyclops and the suitors.

Key takeaways

• The Odyssey begins near the end, with Telemachus's search and Odysseus's release from Calypso, and tells the adventures in flashback.
• Poseidon's anger over the blinding of Polyphemus, and the crew's slaughter of the Sun's cattle, keep Odysseus from home.
• Odysseus spends a year with Circe and seven years with Calypso, and is gone twenty years in all.
• His return is a chain of recognitions, ending with Penelope's test of the olive-tree bed.
• Teiresias promises a gentle death; the lost Telegony has Odysseus killed unknowingly by his son.

Sources

• Samuel Butler (trans.), Homer, The Odyssey (1900), Project Gutenberg
• Hugh G. Evelyn-White (trans.), Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, including the Epic Cycle fragments (1914), Project Gutenberg
• Sir James George Frazer (trans.), Apollodorus, The Library, Epitome 7.36 with notes (1921), Perseus Digital Library