The Complete Story of Homer's Odyssey Explained

You already know the story, even if you have never read a single page of it. When a computer virus hides inside a harmless-looking program, we call it a Trojan horse. A person with one single weak spot is said to have an Achilles' heel. A long, grueling journey full of trials, you call an odyssey. And when someone is forced to choose between two equally terrible options, we say they are caught between Scylla and Charybdis. All of these words, the ones you use without a second thought, come from a single text written almost 3,000 years ago, from Homer's Odyssey. So, you live inside this story every single day, and yet you

have probably never read it from beginning to end, and you have no idea how all the pieces actually fit together. And there is something even stranger that almost no one stops to think about. We still are not sure that the events behind this story ever really happened, at least not the way Homer tells them. So, keep one question in the back of your mind as we go. When you watch the story of the Odyssey, what are you actually watching? Real history, a beautiful fairy tale, or something far stranger that sits right in the middle between the two? The cave smells of damp sheep's wool, rotting meat, and copper. 12 men are pressed against the cold stone wall, frozen with terror. The only way out is blocked by a boulder weighing thousands

of pounds, one that no single man could ever move. By the fire sits the owner of the cave, a giant with a single eye in the middle of his forehead, named Polyphemus. He does not plow the land, he does not hold assemblies, and he does not honor the ancient laws He simply eats anyone who wanders into his cave. Four of the crew he has already killed and devoured raw, right in front of the others. This is the most famous trap in all of ancient literature, and the man locked inside it with his doomed companions is Odysseus, king of Ithaca. He does not try to fight the monster head-on because he understands that brute force will not get him out. Instead, he approaches the giant with a skin of wine. This is a

special wine, so strong that it was meant to be watered down 20 to 1, and Odysseus serves it undiluted, cup after cup, until Polyphemus collapses into a drunken stupor. Just before he passes out, the giant asks his guest for a name, and Odysseus answers that his name is nobody. Once the giant is asleep, Odysseus and his surviving men drive a sharpened, red-hot stake into his single eye. Polyphemus wakes with a roar, and the other giants come running to his cave and ask through the stone who is hurting him. And the blinded Polyphemus honestly screams back, "Nobody." Hearing this, the neighbors decide that some god has sent him a sickness, and they calmly go away. The next morning, the blind

giant rolls back the stone to let his sheep out to pasture, running his hands over the back of each animal to make sure no man is riding out on top. But Odysseus and his companions escape another way, clinging to the thick wool under the animals' bellies, right beneath the monster's hands. It is a flawless escape, but the moment Odysseus reaches his ship and pulls away from the shore, his pride gets the better of his judgment. He cannot stand the thought of the giant believing he was beaten by some nobody, and standing on the deck, he shouts his real name across the water. "I am Odysseus of Ithaca." That single flash of ego becomes the curse of his entire life. Polyphemus turns out to

be the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and now he prays to his father for revenge. From that second on, the ocean itself turns against Odysseus. He got out of the cave, but he has just handed his name to a hostile god, and he sails off into a world that wants him dead. Except the monsters he is about to face are not made up at all. They are the distorted echo of a very real and genuinely terrifying historical apocalypse. To understand why a Greek king is fighting giants and witches, you have to look back at the ashes he left behind him. Odysseus is trying to sail home from the ruins of Troy. It all began, as these things often do in ancient stories, with a stolen wife. A prince of

Troy carried off Helen, the wife of a Greek king, and to win her back, the kings of Greece gathered a combined fleet and besieged the city for 10 years. They could never take it by force until Odysseus came up with a trick. He proposed building an enormous wooden horse, hiding a band of warriors inside it, and leaving it at the gates as if it were a gift. The Trojans dragged the horse behind their own walls, and that night, the warriors climbed out and opened the gates to their army. For centuries, historians confidently claimed that there had never been any Troy at all, and dismissed the 10-year siege, the thousand ships, and the golden city as pure poetic invention. Then, in the late 19th century, a wealthy German businessman named Heinrich Schliemann

took a copy of the poem, traveled to what is now Turkey, and began to dig at the hill of Hisarlik. There he found massive stone walls. He found traces of a great fire, and he even found an impressive hoard of golden ornaments, which he immediately declared to be the treasure of the Trojan king Priam. Schliemann stunned the academic world and proved that a real city stood behind the myth. There was only one problem. Schliemann was an amateur who dug like a treasure hunter rather than an archaeologist. He tore straight down toward the oldest gold, smashing through and throwing out the layers that lay above it. And one of those layers was the very city of the Homeric war. The hoard he pulled out and named the treasure of Priam had in fact

been buried more than a thousand years before Odysseus would have lived. Later archaeology, above all the work of Carl Blegen, showed that the hill of Hisarlik hides not one city, but at least nine, built one on top of another. The golden hoard that Schliemann dug up belonged to a city that had stood on this hill more than a thousand years before the time of Odysseus, which means it had nothing to do with Priam. But if you look at the layer that archaeologists label Troy VIIA, you find something frightening. This is a city with high defensive walls that burned and was taken by storm shortly after the year 1200 BC. Arrowheads were left lodged in the walls, bodies were left unburied in

the courtyards, and stores of food were hidden away in the houses the way they are during a long siege. And we have more than just stones. We have written sources. Directly behind Troy, inland, lay the Hittite empire, the superpower of that age, which kept meticulous diplomatic archives on almost indestructible clay tablets. In these Hittite records, there is mention of a vassal city on the coast called Wilusa, which is the exact linguistic ancestor of the word Ilios, the Greek name for Troy. In those same records, the Hittites complain about aggressive sea chieftains from the west whom they call the Ahhiyawa, which is precisely the term Homer uses for the Achaean Greeks. So, the Greeks were there, and the city was there.

But, the Hittite tablets do not describe a 10-year siege waged by a single Greek army over a stolen queen. They describe something far more chaotic. An age of piracy, shifting alliances, and general collapse. The Trojan War was most likely not one glorious campaign, but a symptom of the Bronze Age collapse. Around the 12th century BC, the entire Mediterranean system fell apart all at once. The Hittite Empire fell. The Mycenaean palaces of Greece burned to the ground. Trade networks vanished. Writing was completely forgotten. And whole peoples pulled up their roots and took to the sea, becoming the very sea

peoples who struck terror everywhere they went. By the time the poet we call Homer composed the Odyssey, around the 8th century BC, he was living in a world slowly recovering from 400 years of Dark Ages. The enormous ruined walls of Mycenae and Troy were still standing in plain sight, but the people of his time could not believe that ordinary men had built them, and credited them to gods and heroes instead. And the poem was performed for Greek colonists, for the people who boarded small ships and sailed off into the frightening, uncharted waters of the Black Sea, and toward the shores of Sicily to found new cities. For them, the whole Mediterranean was full of unknown dangers, and a foreign shore might

promise a meeting with friendly locals just as easily as a meeting with savages who do not plow the land, who drink their wine undiluted, and who eat their guests. So, the Cyclops was not just a fairy tale monster. He was the colonists' ultimate nightmare. But, the physical dangers of the sea were nothing compared to what our hero had to face next. To find his way home, he would have to leave the map behind entirely and step into a place no living person is meant to enter. Having blinded the Cyclops, Odysseus loses his fleet piece by piece. First, he is a guest of the lord of the winds, who gathers all the storm winds of the world into a leather bag and ties it tightly shut, leaving only a gentle west

wind to carry Odysseus home. But the moment the shores of Ithaca appear on the horizon, Odysseus falls asleep and his crew, convinced that he is hiding treasure from them, unties the bag. The winds burst loose and hurl the ships back into the unknown. Next, they land in the country of the Laestrygonians, a tribe of cannibal giants, who hurl huge boulders from the cliffs and smash 11 of the 12 ships. Only Odysseus himself and his closest men survive on the last ship. They are carried to the island of the witch Circe, who turns the landing party she meets into pigs. The god Hermes gives Odysseus an antidote in advance and protected from her magic, he backs

Circe into a corner. But instead of killing her, he stays in her bed for a full year until his men begin begging him to finally remember Ithaca and force him to leave. And yet Circe sets the terrifying condition. To find the way home, Odysseus cannot simply sail west. He must sail to the very edge of the world, to the shores of the great river ocean, which the Greeks believed encircled the flat earth. And there he must speak with a dead prophet. He has to go down into the land of the dead. The Greek land of the dead is not a place of fire and demons, but a bleak gray wasteland where the souls of the dead drift like smoke, stripped of memory and purpose, squeaking like bats.

To make them speak with him, Odysseus digs a trench in the ground and cuts the throats of black sheep. The dead are drawn to the smell of warm blood. To remember who they were in life, they need to drink it. Odysseus sits by the trench with his bronze sword drawn, driving the swarming shades away from the blood while he waits for the prophet. And he even has to drive off the ghost of his own mother, whose death he never learned about while he was far from home. But the most pivotal moment of the entire poem comes when Odysseus meets the shade of Achilles, the same warrior whose name gave us the phrase Achilles' heel. Achilles was the greatest hero of the Trojan War, and he

had once deliberately chosen a short, but glorious life and an early death in battle, so that his name would live forever. Odysseus tries to comfort him and says that here, among the dead, he must surely be honored like a king. And then Achilles speaks words that bring down the entire heroic code of the ancient world. He says he would rather be a poor laborer for a landless pauper up on the earth than the absolute lord over all the dead. This is the turning point of all Greek literature. The Iliad was a poem about how beautiful it is to die for glory. The Odyssey is a poem about how that glory is an empty lie, and how in the end only one thing matters, surviving at any cost and returning to the people you love.

Odysseus leaves the land of the dead knowing the way home at last, but the universe is not done knocking the pride out of him. Before he can reclaim his kingdom, he will have to lose almost everything human he has left. On the way back, a whole long of deadly trials is waiting for Odysseus. First come the Sirens, creatures whose singing is so beautiful that it lures sailors onto the rocks where the ships shatter and the men die. This is the very word we use today for the wail of an ambulance or a fire truck. Odysseus wants to hear their song and still survive. So, he orders his rowers to plug their ears with wax and has himself tied tightly to the mast. And so, he passes by. He hears the forbidden song,

but bound to the mast, he cannot throw himself after it. Next comes a narrow strait guarded by two monsters at once, Scylla and Charybdis. One snatches sailors straight off passing ships. The other sucks whole vessels down into a giant whirlpool. This is exactly where the phrase caught between Scylla and Charybdis comes from, meaning caught between two equally deadly dangers. Odysseus chooses the lesser of two evils and steers the ship closer to Scylla, knowing in advance that she will devour six of his men because Charybdis would have taken the entire ship. And then comes the very thing the prophet had warned Odysseus about. On one of the islands graze the sacred herds of

Helios, the sun god, and they must not be touched under any circumstances. Odysseus remembers the ban and begs his companions not to lay a hand on these animals, but he falls asleep once again and his crew, worn down by hunger, cannot hold out and slaughter a few of the cattle for food. The reckoning comes at once. The moment the ship puts back out to sea, Zeus splits it with a bolt of lightning and all of Odysseus's companions drown. He alone is left alive. Clinging to a piece of the wreck, he is washed up alone on the island of Ogygia where the nymph Calypso lives. Her name literally means the one who conceals and for seven whole years she conceals him from the entire world. She

offers him the greatest reward imaginable. If he stays with her, she will make him immortal. He will never grow old, never die, and will live forever in paradise. And Odysseus refuses. Every day he sits on the rocky shore, stares at the horizon, and weeps because he does not want to be a god. He wants to grow old beside his mortal wife, Penelope, and he chooses the pain and decay of a human life over a barren eternity. Moved by his tears, the gods finally step in and force Calypso to let him go. Odysseus builds a raft, survives one last brutal shipwreck arranged by Poseidon, and is washed up among the Phaeacians, a rich and peaceful seafaring people who have never fought a single war in their lives. The Phaeacians listen to his story, set him

on their swift ship, and carry him all the way to Ithaca. They leave him sleeping on the shore surrounded by the treasures they gave him. And when he opens his eyes, Odysseus does not recognize his own homeland. So, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, has to clear away the mist and tell him where he is. He has been gone for 20 years, but no warm embrace is waiting for him at home. His palace has been taken over by more than a hundred young, well-armed noblemen who, believing Odysseus is dead, have moved into his house, are slaughtering his livestock, drinking his wine, and demanding that Penelope marry one of them and hand over the throne.

Odysseus is a brilliant tactician and he understands that if he walks into the palace and declares himself king, a hundred swords will cut him to pieces in a matter of seconds. So, the greatest king of Ithaca, the man who outwitted all of Troy and blinded the Cyclops, puts on filthy rags and turns himself into an old, scarred beggar. He walks the road to his own house, ready to endure any humiliation. The first to recognize him is not a person, but a dog. Long ago, as he was leaving for war, Odysseus left behind a puppy named Argos. Now, that dog is decrepit and forgotten, and he has lain waiting on a dung heap for 20 years. Deaf and half-blind, he still

catches the scent of his master, lifts his head, wags his tail one last time, and having finally lived to see this meeting, dies right there on the spot. It was for this alone that he held on all these years. Inside the hall, the suitors greet the beggar with cruel contempt. They throw a stool at his back, hurl a cow's hoof at his head, and make him fight for scraps with another local vagrant. Odysseus swallows every insult, sits by the fire, counts the men, and waits. And the exhausted Penelope, out of any other options, announces a final contest. She brings out her husband's enormous hunting bow, and declares that she will marry the man

who can string this heavy weapon and send a single arrow through the narrow rings of 12 axes lined up in a row. One after another, the young, arrogant suitors step up to the bow, and one after another, they fail because they cannot even bend it far enough to loop on the string. And then, from the back of the hall, the beggar speaks up and asks to be allowed to try. The suitors laugh and curse, offended that some vagrant would dare touch a king's weapon. But Penelope's son, Telemachus, who secretly already knows who this is, demands that the bow be handed to the beggar. A dead silence falls over the hall. Odysseus takes the heavy wood in his hands, and he does not strain, does not struggle with it, but easily, like a musician tuning a

lyre, bends the bow and slips on the string. He plucks it, and it answers with a sharp, frightening hum. Without even rising from his seat, he sets an arrow and sends it through all 12 axes. Then he throws off his rags, bearing his scarred chest, and puts the second arrow through the throat of the suitors' leader. Panic breaks out. The suitors rush to the walls for spears and shields, but the walls are bare. Odysseus and Telemachus had already removed every weapon the night before, and the doors are locked, and there is no way out. What follows is no longer a duel, but a massacre. Odysseus, Telemachus, and two loyal servants methodically kill every last man

until each suitor lies dead. The king has taken back his home. He is reunited with Penelope, proving who he is the only way he can. He reveals the secret of their marriage bed, which he once carved directly from the trunk of a living olive tree still rooted in the ground, which means it is impossible to move, and only her true husband could have known it. If this were a modern action movie, the story would end right here on a triumphant freeze-frame of the victorious hero. But Homer understands something far deeper about the nature of violence. The slain suitors were the sons of the richest families of Ithaca and the neighboring islands. The next morning, the fathers of the dead take up

arms and march on the palace demanding blood, and a savage civil war is about to break out. Odysseus and his son already lock their shields, ready to begin the slaughter all over again. But then the goddess Athena descends from steps between the two warring sides, and in a thunderous voice commands them to stop the fight. The weapons fall from their hands. The blood feud is halted. The poem ends not with glorious killing, but with a peace imposed from above. And this is exactly how the Odyssey should be read. It is not merely a sequel to the Trojan War. It is its complete negation. Odysseus was the

greatest trickster of the ancient world, the man who engineered the fall of Troy and bathed in the blood of his enemies. But his own poem seems to punish him for it. It strips him of his fleet, his wealth, his pride, and his very identity as a hero, and leaves him naked on a beach. The message of those who survived the Bronze Age collapse could not be clearer. Real victory is not burning someone else's city, but breaking the cycle of violence. And the greatest hero is not the one who dies beautifully on the battlefield, but the one who endures the very worst the universe can throw at him for the single reason of walking back through his own front door.

Maybe that is why you know pieces of it almost by heart without ever having opened the book. In 3,000 years, people have never been able to forget this story. That is what to keep in mind when you meet the Odyssey, on the page, on a screen, wherever you find it. Not the size of the fleet, but the length of the road home.