The Trojan War is over. Of the Greek kings who fought it, only one has not come home. Odysseus — king of the small rocky island of Ithaca, husband of Penelope, father of an infant son named Telemachus when he left — has been at sea, or at sail, or shipwrecked, or held captive, for another ten years. No one knows whether he is alive.
In his absence, his house is being eaten down to the floorboards. A hundred young men of Ithaca and the surrounding islands have moved into his palace. They call themselves suitors. They are courting Penelope. She has not chosen any of them and shows no sign of doing so. Meanwhile they slaughter Odysseus's pigs and oxen, drink his wine, lounge on his furniture, and treat his now-grown son as a nuisance they can intimidate.
On Olympus, the goddess Athena — Odysseus's lifelong protector — finally decides that this has gone on long enough. "Father Zeus," she says. "The man has suffered. The captivity has lasted seven years. Calypso the nymph holds him on her island, longing for him, refusing to release him. He longs only for the smoke rising from his own chimney. Send Hermes. Free him. Bring him home."
Zeus agrees. While Hermes sets out for Calypso's island, Athena herself goes to Ithaca — to the palace — to find Telemachus. She disguises herself as an old family friend and finds the boy sitting unhappy in his own hall, watching strangers eat his father's meat. She tells him: enough. You are not a child. Sail. Go to Pylos, to old King Nestor; go to Sparta, to King Menelaus. Ask them for news of your father. If he is alive, hold the throne for him. If he is dead — claim it for yourself.
Telemachus does. He calls an assembly, announces his journey, sails by night. The poem's first four books are his — the Telemachy — and they end with him in Sparta, hearing from Menelaus that Odysseus was last seen weeping on an island, alive but trapped.
Meanwhile, Hermes reaches Calypso. The nymph weeps. She has loved Odysseus seven years; she has offered him immortality. He has refused all of it. He sits on the shore every day looking east. She knows. She lets him go.
Odysseus builds a raft. Poseidon — god of the sea, who has hated Odysseus for years, for reasons we will come to — sees the raft and smashes it. Odysseus, near-drowned, naked, washes up on the coast of the Phaeacians, a sea-people on the island of Scheria. The young princess Nausicaa finds him on the beach. She brings him to her father, King Alcinous. The Phaeacians welcome him; they ask his name; he eats; he drinks; eventually they ask the question every host must ask. Who are you, stranger, and where are you from?
And here — at the long table in Alcinous's hall, on the night of his rescue — Odysseus speaks his name for the first time in the poem.
"My name is Odysseus, son of Laertes. My fame ascends to heaven. I live on Ithaca, a rugged island that breeds brave men, and my eyes know none I would rather look upon. The goddess Calypso kept me with her in her cave and wanted me to marry her. So did the cunning Circe. Neither could persuade me. For nothing is dearer to a man than his own country and his parents. However splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it is far from his father and mother, he does not care about it."
And then he tells them. Books Nine through Twelve are the long, hallucinatory inset — the journey home, narrated by the man himself, after the fact, sitting at a king's table.
"First we landed at Ismarus, sacked the town, lingered too long. The Cicons came for us. We lost half a dozen men from every ship. Then Zeus raised the north wind. It tore the sails. Nine days of foul wind. On the tenth we reached the land of the Lotus-eaters."
"The Lotus-eaters did no harm. They simply ate a flower that made them forget the way home. Two of my men ate it. They stopped caring. I had to drag them weeping back to the ships and tie them under the benches."
"From there we came to the land of the one-eyed giants. We went into a cave that turned out to be inhabited. The owner came home — Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, twice the height of a man, with one eye in the middle of his forehead. He rolled a boulder across the door. He ate two of my men for supper. He asked me my name."
"I told him my name was Nobody. That night, while he slept drunk on the wine I had given him, six of us drove a sharpened olive-wood stake into his single eye. He woke screaming. The other giants outside called: who has hurt you, Polyphemus? Nobody! he screamed. Nobody is killing me! So they went back to bed."
"In the morning he opened the cave to let his sheep out. We rode under the bellies of the rams, clinging to the wool. When we were safely back on the ship, sailing free of the shore — that was when I made my mistake. I shouted across the water. I told him my real name. 'It was Odysseus,' I shouted, 'son of Laertes, of Ithaca, who blinded you.' He prayed to his father, Poseidon. And the god heard him."
That curse — to be the longest-delayed sailor in the world, to lose every companion, to come home alone, late, and to a house in trouble — that curse, granted by Poseidon to his blinded son, runs through everything Odysseus tells next.
"We came to the floating island of Aeolus, lord of the winds. He gave me a sack containing every wind but the one I needed. Nine days I steered. On the tenth, in sight of Ithaca, I slept. My men, jealous, thinking the sack held gold, opened it. The winds blew us back. Aeolus would not help me a second time. He said the gods hated me."
"We came to Circe, who turned my men into pigs. With Hermes's herb I resisted her. She turned them back. We stayed a year — a sweet, terrible year — and then she sent me to the underworld, to ask the prophet Tiresias how to get home."
"I went down. I poured the libation. I saw the dead. I saw my mother, who had not been dead when I left. I saw Agamemnon, murdered at his own door. I saw Achilles, who told me — and I have never been able to shake this — that he would rather be a hired hand for a poor farmer above the sun than king of all the dead. I saw Tiresias, who told me the route home: past the Sirens, past Scylla and Charybdis, past the Cattle of the Sun. 'Touch the cattle,' he said, 'and you lose everything.'"
"We passed the Sirens with wax in the men's ears and me tied to the mast. We passed Scylla, who took six men in six mouths. We passed Charybdis, the whirlpool. We came to the cattle of the Sun. I told the men: do not. The men, starving, waited until I slept, and slaughtered the cattle anyway. The Sun complained to Zeus. Zeus broke the ship with a single thunderbolt. Every man drowned except me."
"I clung to a beam for nine days. On the tenth I washed up on Calypso's island. She kept me seven years."
That is the inset. When Odysseus finishes telling it, the Phaeacians stand. They are a sailing people; they understand the cost of what they have just heard. They load a ship with gifts. They sail him home. They leave him sleeping on a beach in Ithaca with his treasure piled beside him. He has been gone twenty years.
He wakes alone. Athena meets him in disguise. He does not recognize her at first. She does recognize him, of course; she always has. She tells him the truth — the suitors, the palace, Penelope. She tells him to disguise himself as a beggar and watch.
He does. The second half of the poem — Books Thirteen through Twenty-Four — is his slow, careful return. He goes first to the hut of Eumaeus, his loyal swineherd. He tells him only that he is a stranger. He waits.
Telemachus, returning from Sparta, arrives at the same hut. Father and son recognize each other in private; they weep; they plan. Telemachus goes ahead to the palace. Odysseus, still disguised as a beggar, follows.
In the palace the suitors mock him. One throws a stool at his head. Penelope hears that a stranger is in the hall and sends for him — she suspects nothing — and questions him by lamplight. She tells him her trick of weaving and unweaving Laertes's shroud to delay the marriage. She tells him she will set the trial of the bow tomorrow.
"Whoever can string my husband's bow and shoot an arrow clean through the line of twelve axe-heads — that man I will marry. Tomorrow. I have waited as long as I can wait."
The old nurse Eurycleia washes the beggar's feet that night. She sees, on his thigh, the white scar where a boar tusked him as a boy. She knows. He puts his hand over her mouth. He swears her to silence. The room is full of suitors; her cry would kill him.
The next day. The bow is brought out. The axes are set. One by one the suitors try. Not one can bend the bow even halfway. The beggar in the corner asks if he might try, for sport. They laugh. Telemachus quietly insists. They hand him the bow. He strings it as a singer strings a lyre. He shoots cleanly through twelve axe-heads. He turns from the line and pours the arrows out at his feet on the floor.
"Now for another mark, which no man has yet hit."
The first arrow takes the worst suitor through the throat. From that moment, while Telemachus and Eumaeus and the cowherd fight beside him, Odysseus does what he came to do. The slaughter in the hall is total. By evening every suitor is dead. The unfaithful maids who slept with them are hanged. The hall is washed with sulfur and seawater.
And then — and this is the part the poem holds for last — Odysseus has to convince Penelope. She comes down at last. She has been told her husband has come home and killed the suitors. She does not believe it. She does not believe it because she dares not believe it. She sits across the room from him and does not speak. Telemachus erupts at her — "mother, why are you cold to him?" — and she does not move.
She is testing him. She knows there is one thing only the real Odysseus would know. She turns to the nurse and says, casually:
"Eurycleia. Move our bed out into the hall to make him comfortable."
And Odysseus — who has just killed a hundred men, who has not seen this woman in twenty years, who has held his composure through every disguise — Odysseus loses his temper.
"Move my bed? Who has moved my bed? I built that bed with my own hands, around the trunk of a living olive tree that rises through the floor of our chamber. The bed cannot be moved without the tree being cut, and the tree is still there. Who moved my bed?"
There is silence. Then Penelope walks across the room and puts her arms around him.
"Forgive me. I have always been afraid that some stranger would come with a story. I had to know. Only you and I, and one servant who is now dead, ever knew about the tree. You are him. You have come back."
They go to the bed. Athena lengthens the night for them. The next morning Odysseus goes out into the orchard to find his old father, Laertes — who has been mourning him in rags, on a small farm, for years — and reveals himself there too. The relatives of the slain suitors gather to make war. Athena ends the war with a thunderbolt and a command. Peace.
This is what homecoming is, the poem says. It is not the moment the wanderer reaches the door. It is the moment, after twenty years and a hundred deaths and a curse from a god, that the person who waited for him chooses, even now, to know him.
The poem ends, exactly, on her recognition. And on a bed that no stranger could ever have known how to move.