EsoteriaA library of sacred & hidden knowledge
Liber X · Greek Mythology

Liber X · Greek Mythology · Chapter VIII: The Trojan War & the Odyssey

Odysseus and His Wanderings: The Journey Home from Troy

Odysseus' ten-year journey home from Troy: the Cyclops, Circe, the land of the dead, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Calypso and the return to Ithaca.

8 min read 1,825 words Updated

Odysseus (Latin Ulysses) was the king of Ithaca and the cleverest of the Greek heroes at Troy, whose ten-year voyage home after the war is the subject of Homer's Odyssey. On the way he lost every ship and every companion to monsters, storms and the anger of the sea god Poseidon, whose son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, he had blinded; he reached Ithaca alone, in disguise, and killed the suitors who were courting his wife Penelope. His wanderings became the Western archetype of the long journey home.

Odysseus Before the Wanderings: Ithaca and Troy§

Odysseus was the son of Laertes and Anticleia, although some tragedians made the trickster Sisyphus his real father, and the grandson through his mother of Autolycus, famed for theft and oaths. As a young man he was wounded in the thigh by a boar while hunting on Mount Parnassus, and the scar would one day betray him to his old nurse. He married Penelope, cousin of Helen, and had a son, Telemachus.

According to the lost Cypria and Apollodorus, he tried to avoid the Trojan War by feigning madness, yoking an ox and an ass to a plough; the Greek envoy Palamedes laid the infant Telemachus in front of the plough, and Odysseus swerved. At Troy he was the master of counsel and stratagem: he unmasked Achilles on Skyros, spied by night with Diomedes, stole the Palladium, won the arms of Achilles and devised the wooden horse that ended the Trojan War. Tragedy often judged that cunning harshly. In Sophocles' Philoctetes he is an unscrupulous manipulator, and Virgil's Trojans call him cruel.

From Troy to the Cyclops: Cicones, Lotus-Eaters and Polyphemus§

Odysseus left Troy with twelve ships. He first sacked Ismarus, a city of the Cicones in Thrace, but lingered to feast and lost six men from each ship to a counter-attack. A storm off Cape Malea, at the southern tip of the Peloponnese, then drove him for nine days beyond the known world. The first landfall was the country of the Lotus-eaters, whose sweet fruit made men forget their homecoming; he had to drag the men who ate it back to the ships.

Next came the land of the Cyclopes, one-eyed giants without laws or agriculture. Odysseus entered the cave of Polyphemus with twelve men, and the giant trapped them by rolling a huge stone across the entrance, then ate them two at a time. Odysseus made him drunk with strong wine, told him that his name was "Nobody" (Outis), and blinded his single eye with a sharpened stake heated in the fire. When the other Cyclopes came to help, Polyphemus shouted that Nobody was killing him, and they went away. The survivors escaped the next morning tied beneath the giant's sheep. As they sailed off, Odysseus could not resist shouting his real name, and Polyphemus prayed to his father Poseidon that Odysseus should reach home late, alone, on another's ship, and find trouble in his house. Folklorists know this tale of the blinded giant in many versions across Europe and the Near East.

Aeolus, the Laestrygonians and Circe§

Aeolus, keeper of the winds, received the travellers on his floating island and gave Odysseus the storm winds tied up in an ox-hide bag, leaving only the west wind to carry him home. Within sight of Ithaca, while Odysseus slept, his crew opened the bag expecting treasure, and the winds blew them all the way back. Aeolus refused to help a man so plainly hated by the gods. At the harbour of the Laestrygonians, giant cannibals, eleven ships were smashed with boulders; only Odysseus' ship, moored outside, escaped.

On the island of Aeaea lived Circe, a goddess and enchantress and sister of Aeetes of Colchis, the father of Medea (see Jason and the Argonauts). She gave half of the crew a potion and turned them into pigs with a touch of her wand. Hermes met Odysseus on the way to her house and gave him a herb the gods called moly, with a black root and a white flower, that made him immune to her drugs. Overcome, Circe restored the men, and Odysseus stayed with her for a year. Circe became, with Medea, the model of the enchantress in Greek and later literature, and her drugs and spells belong to the long history of ancient magic.

The Journey to the Dead, the Sirens and Scylla§

Circe told Odysseus that before going home he must consult the shade of the Theban prophet Tiresias. He sailed to the edge of the world at the stream of Ocean, dug a pit and poured offerings and the blood of sacrificed sheep, which the shades drank in order to speak. This episode, the Nekyia, is the oldest full description of a consultation of the dead in Greek literature. Tiresias foretold the troubles at home and a last journey inland, carrying an oar, until he met people who knew nothing of the sea. Odysseus also spoke with his mother, who had died of grief for him, with Agamemnon, and with Achilles, while the shade of Ajax turned away in silence. What these scenes reveal about Greek beliefs on the afterlife is discussed in Hades and the Greek Underworld.

Back on Aeaea, Circe warned him of the dangers ahead. The Sirens sang to passing sailors of everything that happens on earth and lured them to their deaths; Odysseus plugged his men's ears with beeswax and had himself bound to the mast so that he could hear the song. He then chose to pass between Scylla, a six-headed monster in a cliff-side cave, and Charybdis, a whirlpool that swallowed the sea three times a day. Scylla seized six of his men from the deck.

The Cattle of the Sun, Calypso and the Phaeacians§

Tiresias and Circe had both warned him not to touch the cattle of the Sun on the island of Thrinacia. Becalmed there for a month and starving, the crew slaughtered some of the cattle while Odysseus slept. When they sailed, Zeus struck the ship with a thunderbolt and all but Odysseus drowned. Clinging to the keel, he was carried back past Charybdis and drifted for nine days to Ogygia, the island of the nymph Calypso.

Calypso kept him for seven years and offered him immortality if he would stay as her husband. The Odyssey opens on Olympus, where Athena pleads for him; Zeus sends Hermes to order his release, and Odysseus builds a raft. Poseidon wrecked it within sight of land, but the sea goddess Ino gave him a veil that kept him afloat, and he came ashore on Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians. The princess Nausicaa found him on the beach, and at the court of her parents Alcinous and Arete he heard the bard Demodocus sing of Troy, wept, revealed his name and told the story of his wanderings. The Phaeacians carried him home asleep in one of their magical ships.

The Return to Ithaca and the Last Journey§

He had been away twenty years: ten at Troy and ten wandering. Athena, his constant protector, disguised him as an old beggar. He was sheltered by the loyal swineherd Eumaeus, revealed himself to Telemachus, and was recognised by his old dog Argos, who died on seeing him, and by the nurse Eurycleia, who knew the boar's scar. Penelope, who had held off the suitors for years by weaving and secretly unweaving a shroud, set them the test of stringing Odysseus' bow and shooting through twelve axes. Only the beggar could do it, and with Telemachus and two faithful servants he killed the suitors. Penelope tested him in turn with the secret of their bed, built around a living olive tree, before accepting him. How the poem was composed and transmitted is treated in Homer and the Homeric Question.

The story did not end there. The lost Telegony told how Telegonus, Odysseus' son by Circe, came to Ithaca looking for his father and killed him unknowingly with a spear tipped with a stingray's spine. Dante, in Inferno 26, imagined a final voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules to death in the southern ocean, and Tennyson's Ulysses (1842) gave the restless old king his famous last line: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

Where Did Odysseus Sail? Geography and Interpretation§

Ancient Greeks placed the episodes in the western Mediterranean: the Cyclopes in Sicily, Scylla and Charybdis at the Strait of Messina, Circe at Monte Circeo in Italy and the Phaeacians on Corfu. The Hellenistic geographer Eratosthenes was sceptical, remarking, as Strabo reports, that one would find where Odysseus wandered when one found the cobbler who stitched the bag of the winds. Modern attempts, such as Ernle Bradford's Ulysses Found (1963), Tim Severin's voyage in a replica galley and Robert Bittlestone's argument that Homeric Ithaca was part of Cephalonia, remain disputed. Most scholars read the wanderings as a world of folktale set beyond the edge of the map, framed by the real landscape of Ithaca. W. B. Stanford's The Ulysses Theme (1954) traces how each age has reshaped the hero, down to James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).

Frequently asked questions§

How long did it take Odysseus to get home?§

Ten years after the fall of Troy, so that he was away from Ithaca for twenty years in all. Seven of those years were spent with Calypso on Ogygia and one with Circe on Aeaea.

Why was Poseidon angry with Odysseus?§

Odysseus blinded Poseidon's son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, and then boasted his name as he sailed away. Polyphemus prayed to his father to delay Odysseus' return, destroy his companions and bring him trouble at home, and Poseidon pursued him for the rest of the voyage.

What happened to Odysseus' crew?§

Most were killed by the Laestrygonians, who destroyed eleven of his twelve ships. Others died at the hands of the Cicones, Polyphemus and Scylla, and the last survivors drowned when Zeus wrecked their ship for eating the cattle of the Sun.

Sources and further reading§