OdysseyHomer

The poem begins on Olympus. Zeus speaks first, and what he says will outlast the plot: mortals blame the gods for miseries they make themselves, beyond what was fated. Athena presses him for Odysseus, then takes her argument down to Ithaca in disguise and starts pushing Telemachus toward being his father's son. Book II is the first time Telemachus speaks in public, calling an assembly and confronting the suitors who refuse to leave his house. Watch Zeus's speech at I.32. The poem's theology is on the table before the action has begun, and everything that follows is arranged around it.

Telemachus visits the two veterans of Troy who did get home. At Pylos, Nestor runs his court on sacrifice and ceremony and remembers the war for his young guest; at Sparta, Menelaus and Helen drug the wine so they can speak about Troy without weeping, and tell the story of Proteus and what the sea-god said about the returning kings. Underneath both visits runs the one story that silences every room: Agamemnon, home from Troy, slaughtered in his own hall by his wife's lover. Homer tells that story three times in these two books. Notice how the poem is teaching you to read Odysseus's homecoming through Agamemnon's.

The poem finally opens on Odysseus himself, four books in. He is on Calypso's island, weeping by the sea during the day and sleeping beside the goddess at night. Hermes arrives with Zeus's order to let him go. Calypso offers him immortality, and at V.215 Odysseus answers her. It is the first speech you hear him give in the whole poem, and he uses it to say that his wife is worse than the goddess in every way he can name and that he wants her anyway. He builds a raft, Poseidon wrecks it, he washes naked onto a Phaeacian beach where a princess is doing her laundry. Watch what he refuses at V.215 and how fast he refuses it.

Odysseus arrives at the court of Alcinous, king of the Phaeacians, who are sailors with no wars and who offer him a ship home without asking his name. At the feast the blind bard Demodocus sings three songs: a quarrel at Troy between Odysseus and Achilles, the affair of Ares and Aphrodite caught in Hephaestus's net, and finally the Trojan horse. At the third song Odysseus covers his face so the Phaeacians will not see him weep, and Homer compares his tears to the tears of a woman whose husband has just been killed in front of her and who is being dragged into slavery. The simile at VIII.523 is worth slowing down on. A man is listening to his own cleverest victory sung back to him and grieves as the victims grieved.

Odysseus begins to tell his own story. First the Lotus-eaters, whose food makes his men forget they have a home; then the Cyclops, a one-eyed giant who eats two of them at a sitting and who lives, Odysseus says, without assemblies or laws, each keeping his own counsel over his wives and children. Odysseus gets out by the name-trick and the wine and the sharpened stake, but as the ships pull away he cannot hold himself in. He shouts his real name back at the blinded giant, and so Polyphemus learns who to curse to his father Poseidon. Look closely at the description of the Cyclops's country at IX.105, and at the boast at IX.502. Almost everything that happens to Odysseus after this book is the working-out of that one boast.

Circe turns the men into pigs; Odysseus, protected by Hermes's herb, turns her. She tells him he must go first to the underworld to consult the shade of the seer Tiresias. At the edge of the earth he digs the pit, pours the libation, and the dead come up to drink. Tiresias gives him the route home. His mother Anticleia tells him she died of grief waiting. Agamemnon warns him about his own wife. Achilles, the hero of the other Homeric poem, says he would rather slave for a landless farmer above ground than rule over all the dead below. Ajax will not speak to him. Pay attention to Achilles at XI.488. The hero of the Iliad has a verdict on the heroic life, and the hero of the Odyssey has to hear it.

Three trials in one book. The Sirens promise to sing anything the listener wants to know; Odysseus has himself tied to the mast so he can hear them without going over. Scylla takes six of his men in a rush he cannot prevent and cannot forget. On the island of the Sun his crew, starving while he sleeps, slaughter and eat the forbidden cattle; the Sun demands vengeance and Zeus sinks the ship. Only Odysseus survives. What the Sirens actually offer at XII.184 is knowledge, not pleasure, and it is what Odysseus wants most. The mast is not a defense against desire. It is a defense against curiosity.

The Phaeacians ferry Odysseus asleep across the water and leave him, still asleep, on the shore of his own island. He wakes and does not recognize it. Athena meets him in disguise; he tells her an elaborate lie about being a Cretan killer in flight, and the goddess of cunning laughs with approval before revealing herself. She disguises him as an old beggar and sends him to the hut of Eumaeus the swineherd, a man so loyal he still sets out the best cut of pork for a master who has been gone twenty years. Eumaeus takes the beggar in and feeds him and does not know who he is speaking to. Coming home, in this poem, does not end the disguises. It begins the longest one in the work.

Telemachus sails home from Sparta and slips past the suitors' ambush at sea. He lands on Ithaca and comes to the swineherd's hut. Eumaeus leaves to carry news to Penelope, and in his absence Athena strips the beggar's disguise and restores Odysseus to himself. Father sees son for the first time in twenty years. Telemachus cannot believe it; Odysseus says he is not a god, he is your father, and they weep together more vehemently than vultures whose young have been taken out of the nest before they could fly. Then they sit down and plan the killing of the suitors. Notice what is not in the scene. Odysseus does not tell the twenty years. Telemachus does not ask. The household is the unit of recognition here, not the biography.

Odysseus goes up to his own house in rags. His old dog Argos, lying on a dung-heap, recognizes him and dies. Inside the hall, Antinous throws a footstool at him; Eumaeus defends him; Penelope asks to speak with the stranger later. The beggar Irus, a real beggar, picks a fight, and Odysseus knocks him senseless to the cheers of the suitors. Eurymachus mocks him for his rags. Athena keeps the insults coming so that the anger will be ready when the day comes. The disguise is not only a tactic. It is the condition that lets Odysseus see the suitors as they are when they do not know they are being seen.

Penelope finally interviews the stranger. She tells him about the web she wove and unwove for three years; he tells her a Cretan story so close to her husband's that she weeps into her hands. Then Eurycleia, washing the beggar's feet in the firelight, runs her hand up the old scar above his knee from a boar-hunt in his boyhood, and knows him. Odysseus grips her throat and keeps her silent. In Book XX omens gather on the house: a maidservant's prayer against the suitors, thunder from Zeus out of a clear sky, and the seer Theoclymenus at XX.351 seeing the walls run with blood and the suitors' food turning to raw meat in their mouths. The last major prophecy of the poem is spoken in a hall that is not listening.

Penelope brings out Odysseus's bow and announces that the man who can string it and shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads may marry her. Each suitor tries, and each fails. The beggar asks for a turn. He strings the bow as if it had been waiting for him, shoots clean through the axes, and in Book XXII turns the bow on the men in the hall. With Telemachus, Eumaeus, and the cowherd Philoetius he kills every one of them where they sit. Then he hangs twelve of the maidservants who had slept with them. The slaughter is long, specific, and uninterrupted. Homer does not look away, and he does not apologize. Watch the fishing simile at XXII.384, and then stay with the hanging of the maids at XXII.465 instead of excusing it, and see what it means.

Eurycleia runs upstairs to tell Penelope the beggar was her husband. Penelope refuses to believe her, comes down, and sits opposite the man across the fire in silence. When he finally speaks, she sets a test only the two of them could ever have known the answer to, and the test is not the scar or the voice or the twenty years of news. It is the bed. In Book XXIV the shades of the suitors go down to Hades where Achilles and Agamemnon are already waiting; Odysseus finds his father Laertes digging in the orchard; the families of the suitors come out for revenge; and Athena and Zeus cut the fight off mid-sentence and impose a peace. Attend to Penelope's test at XXIII.173, and to how abruptly the poem ends once the peace has been declared.