Homer’sThe Odyssey

Twenty years. That is how long Odysseus has been gone from Ithaca — ten years besieging Troy, and ten more lost at sea, shipwrecked, enchanted, imprisoned. Every other Greek hero who survived the war has made it home. Only Odysseus remains, held captive on the island of the nymph Calypso, who loves him and will not let him go.

High on Olympus, the gods take notice. Athena, grey-eyed goddess of wisdom — and Odysseus’s fiercest champion — makes her case to Zeus. The man has suffered enough. His wife waits. His son grows up fatherless. Let him go home.

Zeus agrees. He will send Hermes to Calypso with the order: release the mortal. But Athena has another errand first. She will go to Ithaca herself — not to the father, but to the son.

“Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many ways, who wandered far and wide after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.”

While Odysseus rots on Calypso’s island, his kingdom rots too. For three years a mob of young nobles — one hundred and eight of them from Ithaca and the surrounding islands — has occupied his palace. They slaughter his cattle, drink his wine, harass his servants, and compete for the hand of his wife Penelope. Each believes Odysseus is dead. Each wants his throne.

Penelope has held them off with a trick: she told the suitors she would choose a husband once she finished weaving a funeral shroud for Odysseus’s elderly father Laertes. By day she weaves. By night she unravels what she wove. Three years this ruse has lasted — but a servant has betrayed her, and the suitors now know the truth.

And in the middle of this chaos sits Telemachus — Odysseus’s son, barely twenty, a prince with no power and no father to teach him how to take it back.

But before we see what he does, test what you know. The Trojan War is over. The heroes scattered. Put their fates in order.

Into the feasting hall comes a stranger — tall, bright-eyed, carrying a bronze-tipped spear. The stranger claims to be Mentes, a Taphian sea-captain and old friend of Odysseus. But the suitors are too busy eating to notice. No one offers the guest a chair, a cup, a word of welcome.

No one except Telemachus. He sees the stranger standing at the threshold, ignored, and something in him — his father’s instinct, perhaps — moves him to act. What does he do?

Over the meal, the stranger speaks plainly. Your father is alive. He will return. But Telemachus cannot wait for rescue — he must act. Sail to Pylos, then to Sparta. Ask Nestor. Ask Menelaus. Seek news. And when you come back, deal with the suitors yourself. You are not a boy anymore.

Then the stranger departs — and vanishes into the air like a bird. Telemachus stands stunned. He has just dined with a god.

That night, the bard Phemius sings of Troy — of the long, bitter journey home. Penelope descends the stairs, weeping, and begs him to sing something else. And here, for the first time in twenty years of silence, something extraordinary happens.

Telemachus speaks.

“Mother — go back upstairs. Speech and song are men’s business, and mine most of all, for I am master of this house.”

Everyone stares. The suitors exchange uneasy glances. Penelope, astonished, retreats to her room — not in defeat, but in recognition. Her son has become a man. The stranger’s visit has lit a fire that twenty years of waiting could not. Telemachus lies awake all night, planning. At dawn, he will call an assembly and confront the suitors before the whole island.

The Odyssey has begun — not with the hero, but with the hero’s son learning to stand where his father stood.

Did you follow the voyage?

Five questions from the opening. Answer to see where each one leads.