The Odyssey — Commentary

In brief

Ten years after the fall of Troy one Greek captain has still not come home. He is held on an island by a goddess who wants to keep him, his house is overrun by young men eating his cattle and courting his wife, and his son has grown up without him. Over twenty-four books, or about twelve thousand lines of Greek, the Odyssey brings him back and has him kill them all. It is one of the oldest stories in Europe still read for pleasure and, in structure, among the cleverest.

The poem is often remembered as a set of monsters. Those occupy four books out of twenty-four, and Odysseus tells them himself, after dinner, to people he needs something from. The other twenty books are about hospitality, households, disguise and how you prove who you are to someone who has every reason to doubt it. It is a poem about getting home, and the larger part of it takes place there.

The argument

The first word of the Greek is “man”, and his epithet, polytropos, means something like “of many turns”. Translators have spent centuries on that one word, because it is the poem’s subject. Where Achilles in the Iliad wins by being what he is, Odysseus survives by being whatever is needed. He announces himself to the Phaeacians as “I am Ulysses son of Laertes, renowned among mankind for all manner of subtlety” (Book 9), and when he has reached Ithaca at last and tells a false story to a stranger who is actually his protecting goddess, she is delighted: “He must be indeed a shifty lying fellow,” she says, “who could surpass you in all manner of craft” (Book 13).

The poem’s view of this talent is less comfortable than its admirers suggest. Cleverness saves Odysseus from Polyphemus when he says “my name is Noman”, and then his vanity undoes it: sailing off, he shouts his real name back at the blinded giant, which brings the curse of Neptune and years of ruin. All his crew die, and although the opening lines blame their “own sheer folly”, the reader of Book 9–12 knows that his own curiosity and boasting helped. The moral argument of the poem turns on hospitality instead. Every place he arrives is judged by how it treats a stranger: Polyphemus eats his guests, the suitors devour a house, and a swineherd in a hut gives a beggar the best he has (Book 14).

The poem also makes a bold claim about mortality. Calypso offers him immortality and he refuses (Book 5), though he is found “dying of sheer home sickness”, and the reason is confirmed among the dead by Achilles: “I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead” (Book 11). The whole heroic code of the Iliad is withdrawn in that sentence, by the man who embodied it.

The shape of the poem

The hero does not appear until Book 5. The first four books, the Telemachy, follow his son to the courts of Nestor and Menelaus in search of news, so that we hear about Odysseus long before we meet him, and we watch Telemachus grow up in the absence. Then come Calypso’s island and the shipwreck, and the court of the Phaeacians, where a bard’s song about Troy makes the disguised guest break down. The simile for his grief is the poem’s most startling: “He wept as a woman weeps when she throws herself on the body of her husband who has fallen before his own city and people” (Book 8). The sacker of cities is made to weep like one of his victims.

Only then, in Books 9 to 12, does he tell his adventures: Cicons, lotus eaters, Cyclops, Aeolus, Laestrygonians, Circe, the dead, Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the Sun. They are all flashback and all first person, from a known liar. The story then reaches Ithaca at Book 13, exactly halfway. The second half is slow and tense: he goes home as a beggar, and the poem spends eight books letting us watch him endure insult in his own house. “Heart, be still,” he tells himself (Book 20), arguing with his own feelings.

The climax comes as a sequence of recognitions, each with its own proof. The old dog Argos, “full of fleas” on a dung heap, knows him at once and wags his tail (Book 17). The nurse Euryclea knows the scar on his leg (Book 19). Penelope tests him last, and she is the only one who tricks him. She orders the bed moved. He loses his temper: “Who has been taking my bed from the place in which I left it?” It cannot be moved, because he built the room round a living olive tree (Book 23). Even then the poem has one more proof to go: an old father in an orchard, and a list of trees given to a small boy, “thirteen pear trees, ten apple trees, and forty fig trees” (Book 24).

The voice

Homeric style is built from repetition: rosy-fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea, formulas for eating and for launching ships. Roughly a third of the lines in Homer recur elsewhere. That comes from an oral craft, but the effect on a listener is of a steady, rhythmical world in which terrible events take place at the same even pace as breakfast. Erich Auerbach’s famous essay “Odysseus’ Scar” in Mimesis (1946) built a theory of Western narrative on this quality: everything in Homer lies in the foreground, fully lit, with nothing left unsaid. The digression during the scar scene, in which we learn that the hero’s grandfather Autolycus was “the most accomplished thief and perjurer in the whole world”, shows what he meant.

The free text linked here is Samuel Butler’s prose of 1900, complete in twenty-four books, and it can give the speed and plainness of all this but not the music. Butler’s sentences are clear and often very good. His weaknesses are real. He uses Roman names throughout: Ulysses, Minerva, Jove, Neptune, Mercury. He printed his translation to support a theory, published in 1897 as The Authoress of the Odyssey, that the poem was written in Sicily by a young woman, whom he identified with Nausicaa; the preface and some notes still argue it. And his prose drops the formulas’ weight, opening “Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero” where the Greek word is far richer than “ingenious”. Quotations here are in his words, and “Ulysses” in a quotation is the Odysseus of the rest of the page.

The people

Odysseus

Odysseus is middle-aged, scarred, a very good carpenter and, by his own account, a pirate. Of his first stop he reports: “There I sacked the town and put the people to the sword. We took their wives” (Book 9), with no sign of embarrassment. The false tales he invents for Eumaeus and others are as circumstantial as the true ones, so a reader should wonder how much of Books 9 to 12 to believe.

Penelope

Penelope gets the poem’s best trick after the bed: she weaves a shroud by day and unpicks it by night (Book 2). Whether she recognises the beggar before she admits to it, particularly when she proposes the contest of the bow, is the central open question of the poem. The text does not say. A suitor complains in Book 2 that “she is a very artful woman”. The couple are matched in cunning, which is why the marriage is the poem’s real goal.

Telemachus

Telemachus starts as a sulky boy who cannot control a dinner party, and ends armed at his father’s side. His final act, in the killing of the maids, is a dark comment on what he has learned.

Minerva, Calypso, Circe and Eumaeus

Athena, Butler’s Minerva, is the only deity who likes a human for his mind, and her scene with him in Book 13 is a pleasure. Calypso releases him under orders and with some bitterness; Circe gives him the directions he needs. Eumaeus, the enslaved swineherd, is the moral centre of the second half. Homer addresses him directly in the second person, an intimacy granted to no one else in this poem.

The hanged women

The poem’s most disturbing moment follows the killing of the suitors. Twelve slave women who slept with them are made to clean the blood out of the hall and are then executed. Odysseus orders the sword, but Telemachus says “I shall not let these women die a clean death” and strings them on a ship’s cable, “as thrushes or doves beat against a net” (Book 22). The simile is one of the most delicate in the poem, and it is used for this. Ancient readers took it for justice. Many modern readers cannot, because slave women had little power to refuse the men in that house, and Emily Wilson’s translation has made the point sharply by calling them slaves rather than maids. Margaret Atwood gave them the chorus of The Penelopiad. The scene is no blemish to explain away: it is what the restored order costs, shown without comment.

What Joyce took

James Joyce’s Ulysses takes the poem’s three-part structure, Telemachy, wanderings and homecoming, and the character of its hero. Joyce met him in Charles Lamb’s children’s version, which gave him the Latin name, and Butler’s prose is said to be one of the translations he used; Victor Bérard’s theory of Phoenician sources mattered to him too. The Joyce map links each book to its episode. Each adventure becomes a piece of a Dublin day:

Stephen as Telemachus. A fatherless young man, usurped at home (Book 1), hears out a garrulous old man (Book 3).
Bloom’s adventures in a new order. The island of the winds is a newspaper office, the Lotus Eaters a bath and a chemist, Hades a Glasnevin funeral, and the man-eating Laestrygonians a crowded lunch counter (Books 9–11).
Polyphemus as the citizen. The stake becomes a cigar and “Noman” returns in Joyce’s Ithaca as “Everyman or Noman”.
The Wandering Rocks. Odysseus is warned of them and takes the other route (Book 12); Joyce gives them a whole episode.
Nausicaa. The princess on the beach (Book 6) becomes Gerty MacDowell on Sandymount Strand, moved from early to late.
The slaughter. This is what Joyce refused. Bloom comes home, and no one dies.
Penelope. Joyce’s last word goes to Molly, who is the reverse of faithful.

What he kept was the essential idea that home is a harder subject than war, and a marriage a harder thing to return to than a kingdom.

How it was made

Nobody knows who Homer was or whether one person composed the poem. Scholars agree that it developed out of a long tradition of oral song, as Milman Parry and Albert Lord showed in the twentieth century from the formulaic language and from living singers in Yugoslavia. Dates around 700 BC are an educated guess for its reaching something like its present form. The division into twenty-four books came later, and the text we have passed through the scholars of Alexandria, two of whom, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, thought the poem’s proper end was at Book 23, when husband and wife go to bed. Modern critics are still split on whether Book 24 belongs. It should, I think: without Laertes and the orchard the poem would end on a triumph that it has been teaching us to distrust.

Readers and critics

The poem was the school text of Greece for a millennium. Dante, who had no Greek, sent Ulysses to the eighth circle of Hell in Inferno 26 for fraud, with a new last voyage. Horkheimer and Adorno, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, read the man tied to the mast as a prototype of the bourgeois, buying self-preservation by self-denial. T. E. Lawrence, who translated it in 1932, called it “the first novel of Europe”, and Edith Hall notes that it has been regarded as “the very birthplace of literary fiction”.

Afterlives

The poem has kept generating new versions: Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria (1640), Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, Cavafy’s “Ithaka”, Kazantzakis’s enormous sequel, Walcott’s Omeros, the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Women’s rewritings have been the liveliest recent line, from Atwood to Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018). Christopher Nolan’s film, with Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope, opened in July 2026.

Which translation

The free versions on Project Gutenberg are all old, and Butler’s is the most readable. Butcher and Lang’s 1879 prose keeps the Greek names but speaks in mock-biblical English. Pope (1725, with William Broome and Elijah Fenton) is a great English poem at some distance from Homer, and Chapman (1615) is the version that struck Keats. To read the poem seriously, buy a modern one:

Emily Wilson (2017). “Tell me about a complicated man.” Quick, plain iambic pentameter of the same length as the Greek, and unusually frank about slavery and power. The best place to start.
Robert Fagles (1996). “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns”. Vigorous free verse and the most widely taught; Bernard Knox’s introduction is excellent.
Robert Fitzgerald (1961). “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story”. The most beautiful English poem of them, and takes more liberties.
Richmond Lattimore (1965). “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways”. Nearly line for line, for readers who want the closest thing to the Greek and can bear some stiffness.
Also good. E. V. Rieu’s Penguin prose (1946; revised by D. C. H. Rieu), Stanley Lombardo (2000) for performance, and Peter Green (2018) for rhythm.

How to read it

Read it aloud, or listen. It was sung.
Do not skip the first four books. Waiting for the hero is the point of them, and Menelaus and Helen’s dinner party in Book 4 is chilling comedy about a marriage after war.
Stay for the slow part. The second half is where the poem is greatest, and it needs patience: everything is withheld.

Homer, The Iliad (c. 750 BC). The war itself, and the code that Odysseus’s poem quietly takes apart.
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922). The most ambitious answer to it.
Virgil, The Aeneid (19 BC). The Roman reply, in which the wandering ends in empire.
Derek Walcott, Omeros (1990). A Caribbean Homer, among fishermen.
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad (2005). Penelope and the twelve dead women answer back.
Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017). A classicist teaches the poem to his elderly father, then sails the route with him.