The Odyssey

Twenty years ago Odysseus, king of the small island of Ithaca, sailed away to the war at Troy. The war took ten years. Getting home has taken ten more, and nobody on Ithaca knows whether he is alive. His wife Penelope is besieged by a hundred suitors who camp in her hall, eat her herds and demand she choose a new husband; she has held them off for three years by weaving a great shroud each day and unpicking it each night. Their son Telemachus was a baby when his father left and is now a young man with no power to throw anyone out. The goddess Athena, who has always favoured Odysseus, comes to Telemachus disguised as an old family friend and sends him out to look for news.

Odysseus, it turns out, is alive but held on a distant island by the nymph Calypso, who offers him immortality if he will stay. Zeus orders his release. He builds a raft, sails seventeen days, and is wrecked by Poseidon — the sea-god whose son, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, Odysseus blinded to escape a cave. Washed ashore among the Phaeacians and taken in by the princess Nausicaa, he finally gives his name and tells the whole story: the bag of winds opened by a suspicious crew within sight of home, the enchantress Circe who turned his men into pigs, the journey to the land of the dead to question the prophet Tiresias, the Sirens, the choice between Scylla and Charybdis, and the day his starving crew ate the sacred cattle of the sun and drowned for it, every one of them.

The Phaeacians carry him home. Athena disguises him as an old beggar so that he can walk into his own palace unrecognised, gather his allies — his son, his swineherd, his old nurse — and take the measure of the men who have eaten his house. When Penelope announces a contest with her husband's great bow, the beggar asks for a turn. He strings it, turns the arrows on the suitors, and proves himself to Penelope by the secret of the bed he built on a living olive tree still rooted in the ground.

It is a story about endurance, cunning and the long work of getting home, and about whether the person who finally arrives can still be recognised as the one who left.