The Odyssey

The Odyssey was written by the Greek poet Homer around the 7th or 8th century BC. Its story takes place after The Iliad and follows the journey of Odysseus as he tries to get back home after the Trojan War.

The journey home from Troy to Ithaca takes Odysseus ten years. His wife, Penelope, waits patiently for this time, fending off suitors who try to marry her. Meanwhile, his travel is full of obstacles that he needs to overcome. It even costs the lives of all his crewmates as they navigate through the sea and the whims of the gods.

The Odyssey belongs to the genre of poetry known as an epic. This means that it is a long-form narrative poem that documents the adventures of extraordinary characters. Other epics include The Iliad, The Aeneid, and Beowulf. In more recent times, we have Paradise Lost (1667), The Kalevala (1835) and the mock-epic The Rape of the Lock (1712).

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The obstacles

Odysseus’s encounters in The Odyssey as he tries to make his way home are some of the most famous Greek legends (alongside the trials of Heracles). Despite his strength as a war hero, he gets through many of these trials with his cunning and ingenuity rather than his physical prowess. The trials include:

• They visit the land of the cyclops Polyphemus. Polyphemus then traps them and eats many of Odysseus’s men. Odysseus gets the cyclops drunk and tells him that his name is ‘Nobody’. Once Polyphemus falls asleep, Odysseus sets fire to a wooden stake and stabs Polyphemus in the eye, blinding him. As the rest of the men are escaping, Polyphemus screams that ‘Nobody’ blinded him. Thinking that this means he is okay, none of his fellow cyclopses come to help him.
• When they visit the witch-goddess Circe, she enchants some food to turn half of the men into pigs. Odysseus gets the help of Hermes, who gives him a magical herb that resists Circe’s magic. This makes her fall in love with him, and she agrees to turn his men back into humans and set them free.
• Odysseus and the remainder of his crew make their way past the land of the Sirens. Odysseus makes sure his crewmates resist the Sirens’ charm by using beeswax to plug their ears so they won’t be able to hear their song. Odysseus asks his men to tie him to the mast of his ship so that he can hear the song without jumping to his death.
• The men make their way to the island of Thrinacia where the sun god Helios’s sacred cattle are grazing. Thanks to the warning of Circe before they left, Odysseus warns his men not to kill them. They don’t listen, though, and they hunt down and eat the sacred cattle. Outraged, Helios appeals to the King of the Gods, Zeus, who punishes the crew by causing a thunderstorm. Everyone except Odysseus drowns.
• Close to drowning, Odysseus washes up on Ogygia, which is the land where the gods imprisoned Calypso. Calypso nurses him back to health, but then falls in love with him. She forces him to stay with her as her prisoner for seven years, trying to make him her husband. Naturally, he is very distressed by this because he doesn’t give his consent to the relationship, and he is desperate to return to his wife. Eventually, Athena appeals to Zeus, who sends Hermes to tell Calypso to set Odysseus free.

Odysseus as a character

Odysseus is far from a perfect hero. Throughout the story, his hubris causes almost as many issues as his intelligence solves. For example, even though Odysseus is able to fool Polyphemus, he reveals his true identity to the cyclops to boast before leaving. This results in him being cursed by Poseidon. He also almost murdered his crew after asking them to tie him to the mast of his ship. Finally, despite successfully convincing Circe to turn his men back, he still wastes a year on her island before leaving.

He is also both a victim and a perpetrator of extreme violence. The women he meets during The Odyssey force him into sexual relationships against his will, and he has to go along with it to protect himself and his crew. At the same time, though, he commits extreme violence against people in a similar situation when he gets home.

Upon returning to Ithaca, he finds many suitors trying to marry his wife, Penelope. She has been faithful to him this entire time, so he takes his wrath out on the suitors. As well as killing them, he also orders female slaves or servants to be sentenced to death for sleeping with the suitors. By a modern standard, this is very hypocritical, because he is punishing them for experiencing the same sexual coercion as him. It is really unlikely that they had any more say in their relationships with the suitors than he did with Circe or Calypso.

Influence today

The Odyssey is one of the most influential texts in literature to this day. We still use the term ‘an odyssey’ to refer to a long and arduous journey.

He is also an unconventional hero in many ways. He is an older man whose tales of heroism are already behind him. His motivation now isn’t honour or glory or even doing the right thing. All that motivates him is getting back home. That means that The Odyssey alone doesn’t quite fit the archetype of the Hero’s Journey, which is also inspired by Greek tales like the stories of Perseus or Jason.

We see many references to The Odyssey and the protagonist Odysseus throughout modern culture, too. For example, James Joyce, one of the most influential Irish writers of all time, has a huge modernist novel called Ulysses, which is the Latin version of ‘Odysseus’. The protagonist of the novel, Leopold Bloom, shares many character traits with Odysseus.

Rick Riordan also mentions the stories of The Odyssey in his Percy Jackson and the Olympians book series. For example, in The Sea of Monsters, Annabeth uses her invisible cap to taunt Polyphemus. She calls herself ‘Nobody’ to use his anger towards Odysseus against him. Also, Circe turns Percy and Grover into guinea pigs. In fact, the Sea of Monsters itself is a reference to Odysseus’s journey.

Plus, Calypso encounters Percy Jackson in The Battle of the Labyrinth and Leo in the spin-off series, The Heroes of Olympus. She falls for both boys, complaining that she has to let them go, like she did with Odysseus.

Then you have Epic: The Musical. Since this is a musical retelling of The Odyssey, Odysseus is its protagonist, too. It is a very popular rendition of the story that has blown up on TikTok recently.

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