The Odyssey, by Homer: summary and analysis

Homer's Odyssey is not the story of a journey: it is the story of a man taken apart piece by piece and then put back together. The summary that follows keeps the exact order in which the poem tells it, cantos I through XXIV, because that order is part of the argument itself. Homer does not narrate Odysseus's twenty years, or Ulysses, the two names name the same hero, in chronological sequence, and the gap between the order of events and the order of the telling is one of the smartest decisions in Western literature.

What it meant to "be someone" in Homer's world

To understand the scale of what happens to Odysseus, it helps to know what it meant to be someone in the Greek world the poem portrays. Identity there is not an inner feeling: it is a public thing, made of four pieces, name, lineage, land and past, that is, what others say about you. None of the four depends on the person alone. All four depend on someone else recognizing them. That is exactly what the Odyssey does to its protagonist: it takes the four pieces away, one by one, and gives them back in reverse order.

In the poem's very first line, Homer calls Odysseus polýtropos, "the man of many turns": turns as in routes, and turns as in ways of doing things. His excellence is not strength, which belonged to Achilles, dead young in the Iliad. It is cunning, métis, the intelligence that solves the problem with whatever is at hand, in the moment, not the next one.

It is worth noting a curiosity of names here too. "Ulysses" is not a translation of Odysseus: it is a form that reached English through Latin, itself derived from a Greek dialect variant with an "l" that the Etruscans passed down to Rome. Both names refer to the same man, which is why both "Odysseus" and "Ulysses" get searched when the subject is this poem.

Cantos I to IV: the Telemachy, before the hero appears

The Odyssey does not begin with Odysseus. The first four cantos, known as the Telemachy, are about his son. Telemachus was a baby when his father left for the war, and he is now a twenty-year-old, inside his own home, surrounded by suitors who court his mother, eat the family's livestock and fight over the throne, counting on him to do nothing. And he does nothing, not out of cowardice: because he never had a father, and in a world where identity is also lineage, a young man who does not know his own father is only half a man.

Athena, the goddess of intelligence, decides to act, and does not act like a goddess: she takes the form of an old family friend, Mentes, to advise the young man to call an assembly and set out for news of his father. When Telemachus sails, she returns in a second form, that of a man called Mentor, the name behind the word still used today for someone who guides without solving the problem for you.

Notice the poem's engineering here: while the father is being taken apart far away, losing ships, companions and his name, the son is being put together in Ithaca, gaining a voice and courage. The two movements run in opposite directions, and meet in the middle of the book.

Cantos V to VIII: the seven years with Calypso, and the shipwreck among the Phaeacians

Only in Canto V, nearly a fifth of the way through the poem, does the hero finally appear, and that passage deserves its own reading: Odysseus and Calypso: the seven years of Canto V covers it verse by verse. In short, Odysseus spends seven of his twenty years away on an island with the nymph Calypso, who offers him immortality and is refused, because he chooses to return to a mortal wife, on a small, rocky land where he will one day die.

He leaves the island on a raft that Poseidon destroys, arrives naked on the shore of the Phaeacians and sleeps under olive trees, covered in leaves. It is the poem's lowest point: none of the four pieces of his identity is left, no land, no companions, no possessions, no name. In that state he meets Nausicaa, the king's daughter, and rebuilds himself with the only tool he has left, speech: a short, calculated address, delivered without touching her, that asks only for clothes and directions to the city.

Welcomed into the palace, still without saying his name, he hears a blind poet, Demodocus, sing of the deeds of the Trojan War, and weeps hidden inside his cloak. King Alcinous notices and asks who he is, and only then, at the end of Canto VIII, does Odysseus finally introduce himself.

Cantos IX to XII: the adventures Odysseus himself tells at the table

Here is one of the poem's most brilliant structural choices: the Odyssey's most famous episodes, the Cyclops, Circe and the Sirens, are not narrated by Homer. They are told by Odysseus himself, at the Phaeacians' table, in flashback, to people he has just met. A man who has lost his name, his land and his witnesses is rebuilding the fourth piece of his identity, his past, the only way he still can: by telling it.

In the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, Odysseus and his companions are trapped behind a boulder that no man can move, and the giant begins devouring them, two at a time. To escape, Odysseus gives the cyclops wine, secretly prepares a stake, and, when asked his name, answers:

"Nobody is my name." (Odyssey, IX, 366; Portuguese source consulted: Christian Werner, Cosac Naify, 2014)

Oûtis, in Greek. To survive, he gives up the first of the four pieces: his name. And it works. Blinded, Polyphemus shouts that "Nobody" attacked him, the neighbors conclude he is raving and leave, and Odysseus escapes tied under a ram. Once free, he shouts his real name back at the shore, with his lineage and his land attached, and pays a steep price for it: Polyphemus asks his father, Poseidon, that the man never make it home. And he does not, for ten more years.

On the next island, the sorceress Circe turns part of his crew into pigs, their human minds intact inside, and Odysseus forces her to undo the spell. That scene would have an unexpected afterlife centuries later: the philosopher Plutarch wrote a dialogue in which one of the pigs, named Gryllus, refuses to become a man again, arguing that courage and self-control, which cost a human a lifetime of effort, already come built into the animal. It is the poem's own thesis turned into a living objection: you can be taken apart and be glad about it. What separates Odysseus from Gryllus is not the journey, both traveled. It is wanting to go home.

Further on, the Sirens offer not pleasure but total knowledge: they promise to tell everything that happened at Troy and everything that happens on earth, exactly what would most tempt a hero whose excellence is understanding. Knowing he would not resist, Odysseus has his companions' ears sealed with wax and asks to be tied to the mast before the ship nears the island. He wants to hear, he simply does not want to be able to obey. He does not trust his own willpower, and that is exactly why he survives.

Cantos XIII to XXIV: the disguised return, Argos, the slaughter and the test of the bed

The Phaeacians leave Odysseus in Ithaca, asleep, and Athena covers the island in mist so he will not recognize it right away. From here the poem flips the problem: until now Odysseus was fighting to be recognized, and he now fights not to be, disguised as a beggar, sleeping in the hut of the swineherd Eumaeus, taking blows inside his own house without reacting.

The first to recognize him is not a person: it is his dog, Argos, whom he raised before leaving and who is now old, left on a pile of dung. The dog wags his tail, too weak to stand, and dies right there, after twenty years of waiting. It is the poem's purest recognition, the only one that demands no proof at all.

Then comes the slaughter of the suitors, in the hall of his own house, and the poem does not soften it: alongside them, twelve slave women die too, hanged on Telemachus's orders. Reading a classic is not agreeing with it. It means seeing what the work sees, and also what it does not see, both at once, without choosing one over the other.

But the slaughter is not proof enough of identity. Penelope, the last person in the house to be convinced, puts Odysseus through the poem's toughest test, and that episode has its own article too: Penelope and the test of the bed, in the Odyssey tells why she orders the bed moved out of their room, and why that scene decides everything.

The thesis: a hero taken apart and put back together

Put the pieces together, and the reading of the Odyssey as merely the story of a journey, or of a husband who took too long, falls apart. The poem strips Odysseus of the four things that made him someone, name, lineage, land and past, one at a time, and returns them in almost the reverse order: first body and speech, on the Phaeacian shore; then his name, lost and recovered in the cyclops's cave; then his land, retaken by force in the slaughter; and, last, his past, which is only complete once Penelope, the judge of the rebuilding, recognizes in him the husband who left.

He does not rebuild himself through strength. The Greek world before Homer worshipped Achilles, pure force, the warrior who dies young and becomes a statue. Homer takes that world and says something else: the man who makes it home is not the strongest, he is the one who thinks best. Achilles teaches how to die beautifully. Odysseus teaches how to come home, and he comes home through métis, through speech and through alliances, from the Mentor who appears in the Telemachy to the bed that only he, Penelope and one servant knew about at the end.

That is why the Odyssey keeps being read by people who have already lost something big and had to start over. The oldest poem in the West about becoming someone again does not promise that it is fast, or that you come back unchanged. It promises that coming back is possible.

That full, canto-by-canto reading is what anchors the Nous video lesson on the Odyssey. For readers of Portuguese, Nous recommends Frederico Lourenço's translation, made directly from the Greek and in verse. For readers in other languages, the same criterion the lesson gives applies: look for an edition translated directly from the Greek, not from an intermediate language.

Continue: Odysseus and Calypso: the seven years of Canto V · Penelope and the test of the bed, in the Odyssey · "Nobody": Odysseus and the Cyclops · Truth as coherence
Source class: Odisseia, de Homero