The opening word of the Odyssey is ἄνδρα — a man. Not a goddess, not a king, not a hero of the Trojan war in general, but a specific man, whose name, strikingly, Homer does not give us for forty lines. Instead he gives us an adjective: polytropos. Many-turned. Much-turning. Of many twists. The word means both the turnings he undertakes on his long sea-road home and the turnings his mind is capable of to get him there. The man is a labyrinth, and a labyrinth-walker.

We are in the oral tradition, in a room with a fire, with a bard being paid in food and wine to sing us a story everyone in the room has heard before. The story is twenty years old by the time it starts. The Trojan war has been over for ten years. Most of the Greeks have been home for a decade, some in triumph, some into treachery. One is still missing: Odysseus, king of the small rocky island of Ithaca, husband to Penelope, father of a son now grown without him.

Homer's opening is a prayer and a boast. The prayer is to the Muse — give me the words, I cannot begin without you. The boast is to the listener — you are about to hear, from me, the whole of this man's story, every turn, every trick, every companion lost. And then, before he gives us a single episode, Homer tells us something that the poem will never let us forget. Odysseus wanted to bring his companions home. He tried. He was not able. They died by their own stupidity — eating the sacred cattle of the sun god, disobeying every warning he gave them — and he came home, in the end, alone.

This is the moral grammar of the poem. The hero of the Odyssey is not a man who conquers. He is a man who survives, and who fails to save the people he loves, and who keeps going because there is still a wife and a son waiting at the end of the sea. Homer, in ten lines, gives us the whole book. A man is trying to get home. His mind is capable of any turn the journey requires. His companions are already lost.

The goddess Athena, who loves him as much as a goddess can love a mortal, opens the council on Olympus. She points out to her father Zeus that Odysseus has been held for seven years on an island by the nymph Calypso, who loves him and refuses to let him go. Zeus agrees: it is time. Hermes will be sent. The nymph will be told to release him. The long homecoming will begin.

The Odyssey, unlike its older sibling the Iliad, is a story about mercy. The gods relent. The long punishment is ending. The man will be given back his life. We know this from the opening. What Homer is going to spend twelve thousand lines teaching us is what the life, once given back, actually costs.

The first movement of the Odyssey is not about Odysseus. It is about his son. Telemachus is twenty years old. He has grown up in a household that his father left when he was a baby. For the past four years a hundred and eight young noblemen from Ithaca and nearby islands have been living in the palace, eating his inheritance, courting his mother, and waiting for her to finally admit that her husband is dead. Telemachus has had no power to throw them out. He has been a boy in his own house.

Homer gives us four books on Telemachus before we meet Odysseus at all. This is a structural decision that a later poet would probably not have made. It slows the homecoming down. It asks the reader to understand that the homecoming is not only about one man rowing across a sea; it is about a household that has been waiting, badly, for twenty years, and that has a son in it who is now old enough to ask where his father went and whether he is coming back.

Athena, disguised as an old family friend, comes to the palace. She finds Telemachus sitting among the suitors in a kind of sullen daze. She takes him aside. She tells him he is old enough. She tells him to stop grieving. She tells him to go — to sail to Pylos, to Sparta, to find the men who fought with his father and ask them, face to face, what they know.

Telemachus obeys. He goes. The ship is small; the voyage is short. He arrives in Pylos to find old Nestor, who talks and talks and gives him no real news. He goes on to Sparta and finds Menelaus — Helen's husband, the reason for the Trojan war — living with her now as if nothing had happened, in a house full of gold. Menelaus tells him a story: at an island in Egypt he wrestled with a sea-god and was told, by way of prophecy, that Odysseus was still alive, still a prisoner, on a distant island with a nymph.

This is the first the world has heard that Odysseus is not dead. Telemachus takes the news back toward the ship. The suitors, learning of his trip, lay an ambush for him on the voyage home; Athena will deliver him safely through it.

What matters in the Telemacheia is not the news. The news is thin. What matters is that the boy has gone. He has seated himself at the tables of kings as his father's son. He has heard his father's name spoken by men who fought beside him. He has come back, while not yet a man, a great deal closer to being one than he was when he left. The whole of the Odyssey is a poem about homecomings. Telemachus's — the smaller, quieter one — happens first. He returns to Ithaca able, for the first time, to look his mother's suitors in the face. The poem has made room, four books early, for the fact that when Odysseus finally does get home, he will not do it alone. He will do it with the son who, on these pages, has just come of age.

Seven years Calypso has kept him. Seven years on an island of cedar smoke and fruit trees and calm water and immortality. Calypso is a goddess. She has told Odysseus he may stay forever. She has told him she will make him an immortal — no aging, no dying, no more losses. All he has to do is not sail home.

Hermes comes with Zeus's order. Calypso must let him go. She is bitterly unhappy. She protests, in a speech of wounded pride, that the male gods get to sleep with mortal women whenever they like and nobody minds, but a goddess is not permitted the same. She gives in. She goes down to the beach where Odysseus sits, as he sits every day, weeping for home, and she tells him he is free. He can go. She will help him build the raft. She will give him wine and bread for the voyage. She asks him, in a last flare of hope, whether he is sure; whether he would not prefer to stay; whether he really wishes to leave an immortal goddess to go back to a mortal wife who is in any case older than he remembers her.

Odysseus answers with the most famous small speech in the poem. He knows, he says, that his wife Penelope is not beautiful the way Calypso is beautiful. He knows that Penelope will grow old and die. He knows that he himself will grow old and die. And yet — he says the word kai hos, and yet — he wants to go. Every day, all day, what he wants is his own house, his own wife, his own son. If a god has to break him again on the way there, let a god break him. He will keep trying.

This is the ethical core of the poem. The Odyssey is not a story about a man who will not stop until he gets home. That is the surface. The interior of the story is a man who is offered, explicitly, a very good alternative — peace, ease, a goddess who loves him, eternity — and who turns it down, not because he disbelieves in it but because it is not his. Home is not the better thing in some abstract way. Home is the thing that is his. Calypso's island is somebody else's life. He will not live it.

He builds the raft. He cuts down twenty trees with a bronze axe. He plans and pegs and lashes. Calypso gives him linen for a sail. He puts the wine on board. He puts the bread on board. On the fifth day he leaves. Calypso stands at the shoreline. The poem leaves her there. She does not appear again.

He is alone on a raft on the open sea, without a ship, without companions, going toward a wife who may no longer remember him and a son who has never known his face. He has given up immortality to do this. He will be shipwrecked inside three days.

The middle books of the Odyssey are spoken not by the poet but by Odysseus himself, at the banquet of the Phaeacian king who has given him shelter. This is the great set of tales — Lotus-Eaters, Cyclops, Circe, the descent to Hades, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis — and Homer is clear that they are Odysseus's own version of what happened. They are not vouched for by a Muse. They are told by a man who has reasons to tell them well.

The best of them is the cave of Polyphemus. The Greeks, twelve ships of them, land on an island of wild goats and giants. Odysseus, curious — it is his flaw — takes twelve men into the nearest cave for a look. The cave belongs to Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant, son of the sea-god Poseidon. Polyphemus comes home with his flocks, rolls a boulder across the cave mouth that no twelve men can move, and eats two of the Greeks raw for his dinner.

Odysseus thinks. He cannot kill the giant, because then no one will move the boulder and they will starve in the cave with the goats. He must blind the giant and be ready to escape when the cave is next opened. He plans. He sharpens an olive stake in the fire. He gives the giant the strong Greek wine he has brought from the ship, and the giant, unfamiliar with wine, drinks himself stupid. The giant asks his name. Odysseus says: Nobody. Outis. That is my name. Call me Nobody.

When the giant is asleep Odysseus and his remaining men drive the burning stake into the one eye and twist it. The giant bellows. The neighbour giants come running. What is wrong, Polyphemus, they shout from outside. Is someone killing you? Polyphemus shouts back: Nobody is killing me. Nobody is hurting me. The neighbour giants, disgusted, say well if nobody is hurting you then stop screaming, and they go away. The trick of the name has held.

In the morning the blinded giant rolls aside the boulder to let his flocks out. Odysseus has roped each man to the underside of a ram. The flocks leave and the men with them. Odysseus and his men run to the ship. They launch. They row.

And here, at the shoreline, Odysseus does the one thing his own cleverness has told him not to do. He shouts back. He shouts his real name. He tells the blinded giant who it was that beat him. I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, king of Ithaca. The giant, weeping, raises his hands to his father Poseidon and prays: lord, let him not reach home. And if he must reach home, let him reach it late, and alone, and find trouble in his house.

Poseidon hears. The prayer is granted in full. The rest of the Odyssey — the years of storms, the lost companions, the suitors in the palace — is the answer to one unnecessary boast from a man who could not, in the moment of his greatest cleverness, resist telling a giant his own name.

Circe has told him he must go to the land of the dead. Before he can sail home, he must ask the ghost of the blind prophet Teiresias for his route. Odysseus sails to the edge of Ocean, the black river at the world's rim. He digs a pit. He pours out honey and milk and wine and water. He sprinkles barley. He sacrifices a black ram and a black ewe, and he lets the blood pour into the pit. And out of the mist, one by one, the dead come up to drink.

The eleventh book of the Odyssey — the Nekyia, the visit to the dead — is the oldest piece of ghost-story in Western literature, and the most tender. The dead, in Homer, are not tortured. They are not being punished. They are bored, pale, hungry for blood because blood briefly gives them the ability to speak, and desperately interested in news of the world above. One by one they come to the pit, drink, and tell Odysseus what he most needs to hear.

He sees his mother first, whom he did not know had died. She had been well when he left for the war. She comes up to the pit and looks at him and asks, in a voice that a living woman might use to a child who has come back dirty from the field, how he has come here, through all the rivers and the fear, to be standing in front of her. She tells him she died of grief, waiting. He tries to embrace her three times; three times she dissolves, like a dream, like smoke, in his arms. Homer gives us the detail twice, because he knows what it costs a man to try to hug his dead mother and pass through her.

He speaks to Agamemnon, murdered in his bath by his wife on the day he got home from Troy. Agamemnon warns him: never trust your wife. Odysseus, who does trust his wife, notes the warning and sets it aside.

He speaks to Achilles, the greatest of the Greeks, who in the Iliad had chosen a short glorious life over a long obscure one. Odysseus, in a moment of false cheer, tries to tell Achilles that being a prince of the dead is surely some consolation. Achilles answers with the most famous line in the book: do not speak comfortably to me of death, Odysseus. I would rather be a day-labourer to some poor plowman than king over all these finished people.

He speaks to Teiresias, who gives him his route home — past the Sirens, past the cattle of the sun, past the strait of Scylla and Charybdis — and warns him that if his men touch the sun's cattle, he will come home alone. He speaks to great mothers of the Greek line and to suicides and to heroes, and then the crowd of the dead grows so great, and their hunger for news so great, that he is afraid. He turns. He goes back to the ship. He sails away from the edge of the world.

He has been reminded, in a way no living teacher could have taught him, what home is. Home is not a palace. Home is not even a wife or a son. Home is the place one comes back to while one is still able to be touched, and spoken to, and held. The Nekyia is the central argument of the poem for getting on with it.

The Odyssey is, in its Ithacan half, a portrait of the cleverest marriage in Greek literature. Penelope is not a prize. She is not a symbol. She is a very intelligent forty-year-old woman who has spent two decades running a large estate with its lord missing and a hundred young men camped in her front hall insisting she choose a new husband. She has outthought all of them.

Her first trick was the shroud. She told the suitors she would choose a husband as soon as she had finished weaving the burial shroud for her father-in-law, old Laertes. For three years she wove it. Every night, by lamp, she unpicked what she had woven in the day. Nothing grew. The suitors did not notice. A maid eventually betrayed her, and the shroud was finished under surveillance. But for three years a piece of unfinished cloth on a loom held an invasion in check.

Now Odysseus has come home. He is in the palace, disguised as an old beggar. He has met his son secretly. He has been recognized by his old nurse from a scar on his thigh — the poem's most famous flashback — and has made her swear silence. He has not yet revealed himself to Penelope. He wants to test her. He sits in her hall as a beggar and lets her pass his seat.

She comes down from her rooms. She is beautiful, the poet says, more beautiful than on her wedding day, because a goddess has spread beauty on her. She sits and speaks with the beggar for a long evening. She asks him — without any admission of who she thinks he is — whether he has, in his wanderings, heard news of Odysseus. The beggar tells her a carefully constructed lie, full of specific detail, that contains the truth. She weeps. She does not give herself away.

And then, at the end of the evening, she does the cleverest thing in the book. She tells him — him, the beggar, a passing stranger — about a dream. In the dream, she says, an eagle came and killed twenty geese in her courtyard, and she wept for the geese, and the eagle came back and told her the geese were the suitors and he was her husband. What do you think of the dream, she asks the beggar.

She has just told him, with complete deniability, that she knows. She has told him the game. She has told him the move. The beggar answers carefully that the dream means exactly what it said. She nods. She goes upstairs.

And then she sets the trick by which, the next day, her husband will be given the chance to end the whole thing. She announces to the suitors that she will marry whichever of them can string the great bow of Odysseus and shoot an arrow through the rings of twelve axe-heads set in a row. She knows — because she has known Odysseus since they were both nineteen — that only Odysseus can string that bow. She has set the test so that the beggar can take it.

The Odyssey is often read as the story of a man coming home. Book XIX is the quiet argument that he could not have, without her. Penelope does not only wait. She engineers. She outlasts. She sets the trap by which a hundred and eight men are going to die the next afternoon. She does it while ostensibly asking a beggar about a dream.

The bow has been strung. The arrow has gone through the axes. The beggar has risen in his rags, shrugged off his disguise, and with his son and two loyal slaves killed every one of the suitors in the great hall. The maids who slept with the suitors have been hanged in the courtyard. The palace, after twenty years of unwelcome company, is finally empty.

And Penelope, upstairs, is told by her old nurse that her husband has come home. She does not come down. The nurse is astonished. The nurse begs her. Penelope refuses. She has been fooled too many times by rumours and false news. She wants a proof that cannot be faked. She comes down eventually and sits on the far side of the hall from him, and looks at him a long time in silence.

Odysseus, bathed now and changed, is angry with her. He complains to their son that his own wife will not recognize him. Penelope, to whom the poet gives a small, dry, extraordinary smile, answers him without answering him. She says, as if musing to a servant: let us not argue about it. The man looks like my husband. I am sure in time we shall be quite sure. In the meanwhile, have the serving-woman bring his bed out of our room and make it up for him here, in the hall.

And Odysseus — who is the cleverest man in Greek literature and who has spent ten books tricking gods and giants and kings and witches — walks directly, as she has designed, into the trap. His bed cannot be brought out. His bed cannot be moved at all. He built it himself. One of its four bedposts is the trunk of a living olive tree, still rooted in the ground beneath the bedroom. The bedroom was built around the tree. The bed is part of the house. Nobody has ever moved it because nobody ever could.

He says so, hotly. Who has been moving my bed, he says. Who has cut the olive. Tell me now.

Penelope starts to cry. She crosses the hall. She puts her arms around him. She says — and Homer is here at his quietest — forgive me. I have been afraid of strangers. Only the two of us, and my maid who carried a light the night we married, have ever known about the tree. I had to be sure it was you.

The recognition scene of the Odyssey is the best in ancient literature because it is a recognition in the legal sense. It is a proof. Two people, who could have been lying to each other, establish the truth by means of a fact that only they possess. The olive tree in the bedroom floor is not a metaphor. It is evidence. The marriage is established, beyond any further doubt, by a piece of living wood that is the same piece of living wood it was twenty years ago.

The Odyssey closes a few books later with an ordinary dawn at the palace, Odysseus in his own hall, Penelope at his side, Telemachus grown, Laertes still alive on the farm, the island at peace. But the true ending of the poem is in the bedroom in the small hours, where two middle-aged people stand in each other's arms and are sure of each other, finally, because a tree has kept growing through a floor for twenty years and is still growing there.