Book 1 · Book Guide
Odysseus has been gone from home for years, ever since the war at Troy ended. Every other soldier who survived is home by now. He alone is still missing, trapped far away on an island by the goddess Calypso, who wants to keep him for a husband. Back on his home island of Ithaca, his wife Penelope and his young son Telemachus are under siege by a crowd of suitors, men who have moved into the house, eat its food, and wait for Penelope to give up and marry one of them.
This first book never shows Odysseus himself. Instead it sets the stage. The gods decide the time has come to bring him home, and the goddess Athena goes to Ithaca to wake up his son. Under her push, Telemachus starts to grow up: he stands up to the suitors for the first time and gets ready to go looking for news of his father.
Paris, a prince of Troy, ran off with Helen, the wife of a Greek king. The Greek kingdoms banded together, sailed across the sea, and besieged Troy for ten years. The city finally fell to a trick Odysseus thought up: soldiers hidden inside a giant wooden horse. The Odyssey opens ten years after that victory. Every hero who survived the war has long since made it home — except one.
And Troy itself is real: its ruins are a many-layered mound in northwest Turkey, and one of those layers burned around the right time. Whether the war happened the way the poets sang it, no one can prove — but the Greeks never doubted it.
He’s the king of Ithaca, a small rocky island off western Greece — famous among the Greeks not for strength but for brains. Achilles was the best fighter at Troy; Odysseus was the best thinker, the man who came up with the wooden horse. By Book 1 he has been gone twenty years: ten fighting at Troy, ten trying to get home. Homer’s first audiences knew all of this already. The suspense of the poem was never whether Odysseus gets home — it’s how, and what it costs.
Ithaca has no police and no army. A household’s safety is its men — and this household has none to spare: Odysseus’s father is too old, his son has just come of age, and there are more than a hundred suitors. Worse, the suitors hide behind a sacred custom: guest-friendship, the iron rule that travelers and guests must be fed and protected. Zeus himself is the god of guests. The suitors have turned that rule inside out — guests who never leave, eating the house down to the bones. To a Greek listener this wasn’t just rude. It was the kind of crime gods punish.
Athena walks into the palace looking like Mentes, an old family friend. That’s how gods usually operate in Homer: in disguise, nudging, testing. Any stranger at your door might be a god — one more reason hospitality was sacred. Gods also play favorites. Athena loves Odysseus and his family because he’s her kind of mortal: clever, patient, a schemer. She doesn’t rescue him with a snap of her fingers; fate and Poseidon’s anger set limits even gods respect. What she can do is coach, disguise, and open doors — starting with his son.
The poem opens with a prayer. The poet asks the Muse to sing about Odysseus, the man of many turns, the one who wandered so far after he wrecked the holy city of Troy. He saw the cities of many people and learned how their minds worked, and he suffered storm after storm at sea, fighting to bring himself and his men home. But he could not save the men, hard as he tried. They died by their own folly, eating the cattle of the Sun, and the Sun took away their day of homecoming. Tell us this story, the poet says, and start wherever you like.
By now every man who lived through the war and the sea is safely home. Only one is still kept away from his own country and his wife. The goddess Calypso holds him deep in her hollow caves and wants him for a husband. The years have turned, though, and the time the gods set for his return has finally come. Even so his troubles are not over. The gods pity him, all but one: Poseidon stays furious with Odysseus and will not let up until the man reaches his own land.
While Poseidon is far away feasting with the Ethiopians at the edge of the world, the other gods gather in the halls of Zeus. Zeus speaks first, thinking of Aegisthus, who stole another man’s wife and was killed for it in the end. He marvels that mortals blame the gods for troubles they bring on themselves. Athena seizes the moment and pleads for Odysseus, alone and grieving on Calypso’s island, longing only to see the smoke rising from his own home. Zeus answers that he has not forgotten Odysseus, but Poseidon stays angry because Odysseus blinded his son, the Cyclops. Still, he agrees, the time has come. They settle on a plan: Hermes will go tell Calypso to release Odysseus, while Athena goes to Ithaca to put courage in his son.
Athena binds on her golden sandals, takes up her heavy bronze spear, and shoots down from the peaks of Olympus. She comes to rest at the gate of Odysseus’s house, disguised as a guest, Mentes, the leader of the Taphians. Inside, the proud suitors are sprawled on ox-hides playing a board game, while heralds and servants bustle around them, mixing wine, wiping tables, and carving great heaps of meat. They are making themselves at home on another man’s wealth.
Telemachus sees the visitor first. He has been sitting miserable among the suitors, daydreaming of his father walking back in and scattering them through the house. Ashamed that a guest has been left standing at the door, he hurries over, takes the stranger’s hand and spear, and brings her in. He seats her apart from the rowdy crowd so the noise will not spoil her meal, feeds her well, and then leans close to speak quietly. These men, he says, are eating up the wealth of a man whose bones are rotting somewhere far away. Then he asks the stranger who she is and where she comes from.
Mentes says he and Odysseus were guest-friends long ago, and promises the boy that his father is still alive and will find a way home, clever as he is. Then comes the real push. Tomorrow, she tells him, call the men of Ithaca to an assembly and order the suitors out. Fit out a ship and sail to Pylos to ask old Nestor, and on to Sparta to ask Menelaus, for any news of your father. And think hard, she says, about how a grown man would deal with these suitors, the way Orestes won glory by taking revenge for his father. With that she slips away, flying off like a bird. Telemachus feels the courage she has left in him and knows, with a start, that he has been talking with a god.
Telemachus rejoins the suitors, who sit listening to Phemius sing of the Greeks’ bitter journey home from Troy. Upstairs Penelope hears the song, and it cuts at her. She comes down in tears and begs the singer to choose any other tale, because this one reminds her of the husband she has lost. Telemachus speaks up and surprises everyone. Let the singer sing what he likes, he says; the song is not to blame. Then he sends his mother back to her room and tells her, gently but firmly, that the running of the house is now his business. Amazed, she goes.
Telemachus turns on the suitors and warns them that at dawn he will call a full assembly and order them, plainly, to leave his house. They bite their lips, stunned that the boy dares to speak so boldly. Antinous sneers that the gods must be teaching him to talk big. Eurymachus is smoother, but presses him about the stranger who left so suddenly. Telemachus keeps the truth to himself, saying only that the visitor was an old friend of his father’s, though in his heart he knows it was a goddess.
The suitors dance and sing until evening, then go home to bed. The loyal old nurse Eurycleia, who raised Telemachus from a baby, lights his way to his room with blazing torches and folds away his clothes. Then she leaves, drawing the door shut behind her. All night long Telemachus lies awake, wrapped in soft wool, turning over and over in his mind the journey Athena has set before him.
A guide to our plain-English translation of Book 1. Read the full book →
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