20 questions on Homer's Odyssey — the Cyclops, Circe, Calypso, the Underworld and the reckoning on Ithaca.
Press Enter to start
The Odyssey is the story of a man trying to get home, and nearly three thousand years later nobody has told it better. Composed around the 8th century BC and attributed to Homer, its 24 books follow Odysseus, king of Ithaca, across ten years of wandering after the fall of Troy. He is not the strongest hero in Greek literature, nor the bravest. He is the cleverest — and the poem is a sustained argument that cunning outlasts brute force.
What has kept it alive is how strange and specific it is. A giant one-eyed shepherd outwitted by a pun on the word Nobody. A sorceress on Aeaea who turns men into pigs. Seven years held by the nymph Calypso, who offers immortality and is refused. A descent into the land of the dead to question the ghost of the seer Tiresias. A choice between a six-headed monster and a whirlpool with no good option. And at the end, an old dog on a dung heap who recognises his master after twenty years and dies.
The homecoming is stranger still. Odysseus arrives disguised as a beggar in his own palace, is insulted by the men courting his wife, and is recognised first not by Penelope but by his nurse, from a scar on his thigh. The bow that only he can string settles everything. From James Joyce to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the shape of this journey is still the shape we give to any long road home.