What is the Odyssey about? Homer's story, book by book

The Odyssey is about one man trying to get home. It is an ancient Greek epic poem, attributed to Homer and composed around the 8th or 7th century BC, that follows Odysseus, king of the island of Ithaca, on his ten-year journey back from the Trojan War. Half the poem is his adventures with monsters, witches and gods; the other half is what he finds at home, where a crowd of suitors is eating his wealth and trying to marry his wife, Penelope.

In short

• The poem has 24 books and about 12,100 lines, and it begins not with Odysseus but with his son, Telemachus, in the tenth year after Troy fell.
• The famous adventures, from the Cyclops to the Sirens, are told by Odysseus himself, in a flashback, at a king's dinner table.
• Its great themes are homecoming, hospitality and cunning, and it was shaped by generations of oral poets before it was written down.

How does the story begin?

The Odyssey starts in the middle. Ten years after the end of the war, Odysseus is the only Greek leader who hasn't come home, and he is held on the island of Ogygia by the goddess Calypso, who wants him as her husband. On Ithaca, about a hundred young nobles have moved into his palace to court Penelope, sure that he is dead. His son Telemachus, now about 20, can't stop them.

So the first four books, known as the Telemachy, belong to the son. The goddess Athena, Odysseus's protector, urges Telemachus to stand up to the suitors and to sail for news of his father. He visits Nestor at Pylos and Menelaus and Helen at Sparta, veterans of the war told in the Iliad. Only in Book 5 do the gods order Calypso to let Odysseus go. He builds a raft, is wrecked by Poseidon, god of the sea, whose anger has kept him from home, and washes up among the Phaeacians.

What happens to Odysseus on the way home?

At the Phaeacian court, a bard sings about the wooden horse at Troy, and Odysseus weeps. Asked who he is, he tells the story of his wanderings, Books 9 to 12, which is why the most famous episodes of the Odyssey are told by its hero, who has every reason to make himself look good. Here they are in the order he tells them.

Episode	Book	What happens	What it shows
The Cicones	9	His men raid a town, linger to feast, and are cut down	The crew's greed, a pattern from the start
The Lotus-Eaters	9	Men who eat the lotus forget home; he drags them back	The danger of forgetting the goal
The Cyclops	9	Trapped in Polyphemus's cave, he calls himself "Nobody", blinds the giant and escapes under the sheep, then boasts his real name	Cunning, then the pride that earns Poseidon's curse, since Polyphemus is Poseidon's son
Aeolus	10	The wind god gives him a bag holding the storm winds; his men open it in sight of Ithaca	Home lost through mistrust
The Laestrygonians	10	Giant cannibals destroy every ship but his	The fleet is gone
Circe	10	The witch turns his men into pigs; with the god Hermes' help he resists her, and stays a year	Temptation to stop the journey
The Underworld	11	He consults the dead prophet Tiresias and meets his mother and Achilles	What death is worth; Achilles would rather be a living laborer than king of the dead
The Sirens	12	Tied to the mast, he hears their song while his men row with wax in their ears	Knowledge without self-destruction
Scylla and Charybdis	12	He steers past a whirlpool and loses six men to a six-headed monster	Choosing the lesser loss
The cattle of the Sun	12	Starving, his men eat the sun god's sacred cattle; Zeus wrecks the ship and all but Odysseus drown	He reaches Calypso alone, seven years before the poem begins

Most retellings live in these episodes, yet Odysseus's tale fills only four of the poem's 24 books.

What happens when he gets home?

The second half of the poem, Books 13 to 24, is the return, and it is slower and more tense. The Phaeacians carry Odysseus to Ithaca asleep. Athena disguises him as an old beggar, and he tests who has stayed loyal: the swineherd Eumaeus takes him in, and Telemachus, back from his voyage, is told the truth. In his own hall the suitors mock and strike the beggar. His old dog, Argos, knows him and dies. His nurse, Eurycleia, recognizes a scar on his leg while washing his feet, and he silences her.

Penelope has held the suitors off for years, partly by weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's father and unpicking it each night. Now she sets a contest: whoever can string Odysseus's bow and shoot through 12 axe heads will marry her. Only the beggar can. Odysseus, Telemachus and two loyal servants kill all the suitors, and then the household slave women who slept with them, an ending many modern readers find hard to read. Penelope tests him last, with a trick only he could see through: their bed can't be moved, because he built it around the trunk of a living olive tree. Athena ends the feud with the suitors' families, and the poem closes in peace.

What is the Odyssey really about?

Three ideas run through the whole poem.

Homecoming. The Greek word is nostos, the root of "nostalgia". Odysseus turns down Calypso's offer of immortality to go home to an aging wife and a rocky island. That choice, a mortal life over a divine one, is what links the Odyssey to the Epic of Gilgamesh, a far older story that also ends with a hero accepting he will die.

Hospitality. Greeks called the bond between host and guest xenia, and Zeus himself protected it. Nearly every episode tests it. The Phaeacians are perfect hosts; the Cyclops eats his guests; the suitors are the worst guests imaginable. Their punishment, in the poem's own terms, is just.

Cunning. Odysseus's distinctive gift is metis, cleverness, and he is called "of many turns". He lies, disguises himself and plans. Penelope is his match: her shroud and her bed test are as clever as anything he does. The gods of Greek mythology are everywhere in the poem, but it is human wits that save the day.

Who was Homer, and how was it written down?

No one knows who Homer was, and the evidence suggests the question is more complicated than one author. The Odyssey is in a strict meter, dactylic hexameter, and full of repeated phrases: "rosy-fingered Dawn", "the wine-dark sea", lines that recur whole. In the 1930s the American scholar Milman Parry and his student Albert Lord recorded illiterate singers in Yugoslavia who could improvise poems thousands of lines long using stock phrases like these. Their recordings, now the Milman Parry Collection at Harvard, convinced most classicists that the Homeric poems grew out of a long oral tradition.

Still argued

The "Homeric question", who composed the Iliad and Odyssey and how, has been argued since Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena of 1795. Some scholars see a single great poet, working within the oral tradition, who may have dictated the poem to a scribe once the Greek alphabet arrived in the 8th century BC. Others see a text that settled slowly over generations of performers and was fixed only later, perhaps in Athens in the 6th century BC. Many doubt that the same poet made both epics, citing differences of style and outlook. What nearly all agree on is that oral tradition shaped both poems deeply.

Whether the war behind the poem happened is a separate question; the archaeology of Troy gives a careful answer.

Why is the Odyssey still retold?

Its plot is a template. A journey with trials, a descent to the dead and a hard return home is the pattern critics later called the hero's journey, and the word "odyssey" now means any long, wandering journey. Later writers have retold it again and again: James Joyce set it in a single day in Dublin in Ulysses (1922), and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad (2005) tells it from Penelope's side and that of the hanged maids. Christopher Nolan's film The Odyssey opened in July 2026, the latest of many on screen.

It also lasts because it is two stories readers still live: leaving and coming back, and finding that home has changed. It is one of the oldest works of art in the West that still reads as a page-turner.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: why does the Odyssey begin with Telemachus rather than with Odysseus?
• Why does it matter that Odysseus tells the story of the Cyclops and Circe himself?
• How does the idea of hospitality explain what happens to the suitors?

Sources

• The Odyssey — Homer, translated by Samuel Butler, Project Gutenberg
• Odyssey: Homer's Epic Poem of Redemption — World History Encyclopedia, Mark Cartwright, 2017
• Odyssey — Wikipedia
• Homeric Question — Wikipedia
• Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature — Harvard University