Homer's epic of Odysseus and his ten-year struggle to sail home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy: Cyclopes and sorceresses, the land of the dead, sea-monsters and shipwreck, and a final bloody reckoning with the men who seized his house. Told in the order the story happens, mapped across his legendary Mediterranean wanderings. The years count the decade-long journey home, and images are public-domain classical art. What became of the losing side is told in the companion thread, Troy. Legacy.
After ten years of siege, the Greeks take Troy by the ruse of the Wooden Horse — Odysseus's own cunning scheme. The city burns, and he sets sail for Ithaca with twelve ships, expecting to be home within weeks. He will not see it again for ten more years.
At Ismarus the fleet sacks the city of the Cicones, allies of Troy. But the men linger to feast and drink instead of fleeing; the Cicones rally with reinforcements from inland and kill six from every ship — the first blood on the long road home.
A nine-day storm past Cape Malea drives them to the land of the Lotus-Eaters, whose honey-sweet fruit erases all longing for home. The scouts who taste it want only to stay and dream; Odysseus drags them back to the ships in tears and binds them to the benches.
Trapped in the cave of the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, who devours the men two at a time. Odysseus gives his name as “Nobody,” blinds the drunken giant with a fire-hardened stake, and escapes with his survivors clinging beneath the bellies of the giant's rams.
Safely at sea, Odysseus cannot resist taunting the blinded giant — and shouts his true name across the water. Polyphemus prays to his father Poseidon to make his enemy's journey long and lonely, and bring him home broken, alone and late. The god hears.
Aeolus, keeper of the winds, gives Odysseus a leather bag holding every wind but the gentle west. For nine days they sail; then, within sight of Ithaca's watch-fires, the crew — certain the bag hides gold — open it. The loosed tempest blows them all the way back.
They put in at the harbour of the Laestrygonians, cannibal giants who rain boulders from the cliffs and spear the sailors like fish. Eleven of the twelve ships are smashed and their crews devoured; only Odysseus's own vessel, moored outside, cuts its cables and escapes.
On the island of the enchantress Circe, half the remaining men are turned into swine. Guarded by the herb moly from Hermes, Odysseus alone resists her magic; she restores his crew to human form and — now his lover — keeps them feasting in her halls for a full year.
On Circe's counsel, Odysseus sails to the edge of the world and summons the dead. The blind prophet Tiresias warns him not to touch the Cattle of the Sun, and of the suitors plaguing his home. He meets the ghost of his own mother, and the shades of Achilles, Agamemnon and Ajax.
Warned by Circe, Odysseus stops his crew's ears with beeswax and has himself lashed upright to the mast, so that he alone may hear the Sirens' irresistible song and live. He begs to be freed as they pass; his men only bind him tighter until the deadly music fades.
Forced through a narrow strait between the whirlpool Charybdis and the six-headed cliff-monster Scylla, Odysseus steers close to Scylla as the lesser evil. She plucks six of his finest men from the deck and devours them — screaming his name — before his helpless eyes.
Marooned by foul winds on the island of Thrinacia and slowly starving, the crew break their solemn oath: while Odysseus sleeps, they slaughter and roast the sacred cattle of the sun-god Helios. The flayed hides crawl and the meat lows on the spits — an omen of doom.
As punishment, Zeus splits the ship with a single thunderbolt on the open sea. Every last one of Odysseus's men drowns. He alone survives, lashing the broken keel and mast together and clinging on as the current carries him — for nine days — utterly alone.
Washed up on the island of Ogygia, Odysseus is kept by the nymph Calypso, who loves him and offers agelessness and immortality if he will stay. For seven years he sits weeping on the shore, staring at the sea, until Zeus at last sends Hermes to command his release.
Odysseus builds a raft and sails alone for eighteen days — until Poseidon spies him and shatters it in a howling storm. The sea-goddess Leucothea lends him her veil and grey-eyed Athena calms the waves; half-drowned, he swims to a strange rocky shore.
On the island of Scheria the young princess Nausicaa, washing linen with her maids, finds the naked, salt-crusted stranger and, unafraid, leads him toward her father's palace. The Phaeacians, the greatest seafarers in the world, take him in without even asking his name.
At a feast in the hall of King Alcinous, a blind bard sings of the Trojan War — and the stranger weeps, betraying himself. Odysseus reveals who he is and recounts all his wanderings — the Cyclops, Circe, the dead, the Sirens — to the spellbound court through the night.
Laden with Phaeacian treasure, Odysseus is sailed home asleep and laid at last on the shore of Ithaca, twenty years after he first left for war. In revenge, Poseidon turns the Phaeacians' returning ship to stone. Athena wakes him and disguises him as an old beggar.
The disguised king shelters with Eumaeus, his faithful old swineherd, who does not know him — yet speaks with love of his lost master and open scorn for the suitors bleeding the household dry. From behind a beggar's rags, Odysseus begins to test the loyalty of his own people.
His son Telemachus — grown to manhood in his absence and just back from his own search, narrowly dodging the suitors' ambush — comes to the hut. Alone with the boy, Odysseus sheds his disguise and reveals himself; father and son weep, then plot the reckoning to come.
Odysseus enters his own palace as a ragged beggar and endures the suitors' mockery and blows. Only his old hound Argos — whom he raised as a pup, now twenty years old and neglected on a dung-heap — knows his master. He lifts his head, wags his tail once, and dies.
As the old nurse Eurycleia washes the beggar's feet, her fingers find the long scar on his thigh — the wound of a boyhood boar-hunt — and she knows him at once. Overcome, she nearly cries out; Odysseus grips her and swears her to silence.
Penelope — who has held the suitors off for years by weaving and secretly unravelling a burial shroud — sets a contest: she will wed whoever can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow clean through twelve axe-heads. Every suitor strains and fails. Then the beggar lifts it and strings it as easily as a bard strings a harp.
Throwing off his rags, Odysseus turns the great bow on the men in his hall. With Telemachus, Eumaeus and the loyal cowherd Philoetius — and the help of Athena — he kills all one hundred and eight suitors where they feast, and the disloyal servants after them.
Still wary of a trick, Penelope tests the stranger: she calmly orders their marriage bed carried out of the chamber. But Odysseus built that bed himself around a living olive tree, rooted to the earth and immovable — a secret only the two of them share. At his words she knows him, and after twenty years they fall weeping into each other's arms.
Odysseus is reunited with his aged father Laertes in his orchard. As the slain suitors' kinsmen rise in arms for vengeance, the goddess Athena descends and commands peace between them. The long odyssey — war, wandering and homecoming — is, at last, over.