The poem follows Odysseus, king of the small rocky island of Ithaca, as he tries to get home after the Trojan War. That war, Greek legend’s most famous, ended more than three thousand years ago (around 1200 BCE), when a coalition of Greek kings spent ten years besieging the city of Troy (in modern Turkey) to recover Helen, a Greek queen taken by a Trojan prince. Our timeline tells the full story in order.
When the war ends, his troubles are only beginning. The voyage home should take weeks. It takes him ten more years.
Odysseus is famous above all for his mind — his cleverness, his patience, his gift for talking his way out of trouble. He needs every bit of it. Along the way he faces a one-eyed giant who eats his men, a witch who turns sailors into pigs, and Sirens whose song lures crews to their deaths, while the gods help or hinder him on a whim.
He loses everything but his own life and his stubborn will to get home.
Two stories, woven together
While Odysseus is out among monsters and enchantresses, a quieter and more dangerous drama unfolds back in Ithaca. Everyone assumes he is dead. A crowd of arrogant young noblemen — the suitors — have moved into his house, eating his food, drinking his wine, and pressing his wife Penelope to choose one of them as her new husband.
Penelope holds them off with clever delays, refusing to give up hope. Their son Telemachus, only a baby when his father sailed for Troy, is now a young man trying to find his courage and his place. Part of the poem follows him as he sets out to learn whether his father is alive or dead. So the Odyssey is not only about getting home: it is about what home means, and who is waiting there.
Where it comes from
The Odyssey is roughly 2,700 years old. Most scholars place its composition in ancient Greece around the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, though that date is an estimate, not a certainty. Tradition credits it to a poet named Homer, the same poet said to have composed the Iliad, the great poem of the Trojan War itself. In truth, almost nothing certain is known about Homer, and scholars still argue over whether one person made these poems or many hands shaped them over generations. The debate has a name: the Homeric Question.
What is clear is that the poem grew out of a tradition of performance. Long before anyone wrote it down, it was sung aloud, by bards working from memory, accompanied by a lyre, before audiences who already knew the old stories well. The Odyssey even shows us such singers inside its own scenes, performing for kings at their feasts. It was made first for the ear, not the page.
Why it lasts
Almost every journey-home tale told since owes something to this one. The Odyssey set the pattern. But strip away the gods and the monsters and what remains is plainly human: homesickness, loyalty, grief, and the question of who you really are when everything familiar has been taken from you. That is why readers have never let it go.
About this edition
This is a fresh translation of the Odyssey, made directly from the ancient Greek for Plaintext Classics. It is written in plain, modern English meant to be read with pleasure, not decoded with a dictionary, much as those first listeners followed the singer’s voice. Nothing has been softened: the violence, the cunning, and the raw feeling of the original are all here. And it is free for anyone to read.