1. Why I Read It
I finished the Iliad, and months passed before I opened the Odyssey. I expected a collection of mythic adventures: the Cyclops, the Sirens, the witch — a shelf crowded with monsters. The first page corrected me.
Stranger still were the first four books. The hero does not appear at all; they belong to the people sitting and waiting — the wife whose house is overrun by suitors, the son who sails out to look for his father. A poem named for a hero spends its opening four books on other people’s waiting.
What won me over was its opening line. The Iliad’s first word was “wrath”, anger from the very start; the Odyssey’s first word sings of a man of many turns. Both are epics; one tells how a man burns, the other how a man comes home.
2. The Skeleton First
The Odyssey too runs to twenty-four books, about 12,100 lines in the standard text (the usual count is 12,109), in the same hexameter as the Iliad. The present action covers little time, but the hero’s ten years of wandering are folded inside it: the first half looks for him, the second half has him tell his own story. Its greatest difference from the Iliad is that where the Iliad writes of war and honour, it writes of homecoming and endurance.
The shape of the twenty-four books, set out as a table:
| Book | Contents |
|---|---|
| 1–4 | The “Telemachy”: trouble at home, and the son sailing out to find his father |
| 5–8 | Odysseus leaves Calypso and drifts to the Phaeacians; hearing his own deeds sung, he weeps |
| 9–12 | He tells his ten years of wandering: the Cyclops, the witch Circe, the underworld, the Sirens |
| 13–16 | Back on Ithaca, disguised as a beggar; recognised by the swineherd and his son |
| 17–20 | Enduring insults in his own hall; testing his wife and servants |
| 21–22 | The contest of the bow; the suitors are shot down |
| 23–24 | The recognition with Penelope; a settlement the next day, and the poem ends |
Expand: a few faces (my own annotations)
- Odysseus: resourceful, enduring, and a great inventor of stories; for half the poem he is the one telling his own tale
- Penelope: the wife who stays, holding the suitors off for years by weaving by day and unravelling by night
- Telemachus: the son, the true lead of the first four books, growing from a bullied boy into a man who can stand beside his father
- Athena: the god who helps throughout, changing his looks and giving him plans
- The rivals on the road: the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Calypso — obstacles, and something like stamps in a passport
- Eumaeus: the swineherd, the most ordinary man in the poem, a loyal servant who also serves as a guide
One warning: do not read it as a storybook of adventures. However many monsters there are, they are only signposts; the spine of the poem is “coming home”, and every episode asks the same question — how much distance is left.
3. Passages and Marginalia
On the opening: the first word is “man”
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who wandered far and wide after he sacked the holy citadel of Troy.
— Book 1, opening
My own working translation.
The previous epic’s first word was “wrath”; this one sings of a “man”. The same word — “of many turns” — says both that his road twisted and turned, and that his mind did too: the road is underfoot, and it is also inside him.
笔记One word’s bias says a great deal: writing of war, the poet thinks first of temper; writing of homecoming, he thinks first of a living person. The difference between the two books is on the table from the first line.
On “companions”: one sentence that settles the loss
The fools, who ate the cattle of Helios the Sun; and he took from them the day of their homecoming.
— Book 1, the poet’s aside
My own working translation.
着重点The whole tragedy is settled in one sentence: the day of homecoming was thrown away by their own hands. Not a sea-monster, not a giant — they could not keep their mouths shut. This line of self-restraint matters more than any storm.
My note: that gives the rest of the journey a second meaning. What he has to overcome is not only what is at sea, but the companions who will eat anything once hungry — and in the end he comes home alone.
On “Nobody”: a lie that saves a life
Nobody is my name.
— Book 9, Odysseus to the Cyclops
My own working translation.
He survives by way of a false name. Blinded, the Cyclops calls to his fellows that “Nobody is killing me”, and they take him for mad and stay away.
危险Here, for the first time, the poem makes lying a hero’s skill. In the Iliad, strength means muscle; here, survival means mouth. One culture, two standards, and the poet writes both as virtues.
On “refusal”: Calypso’s immortality
The goddess promised to make him immortal and ageless, but she could not persuade his heart; he still longed day and night for home, if only to glimpse a wisp of smoke.
— Book 5, Odysseus on Calypso’s island
My own working translation.
着重点What tempts him is not a monster but a good place that gives you everything. Immortality, ease, beauty — nothing missing; and still he wants to leave. The strongest contest in the poem has for its opponent not evil but good.
My note: writing this episode, the poet does not make Calypso a villain. She treats him truly and genuinely cannot keep him. That turns “home” from a question of geography into a choice of value.
On “recognition”: the secret of a bed
Penelope tests him by ordering the marriage bed carried out; he blurts out that he made it himself, that one of its posts is a living olive tree rooted in the ground, and no one could move it. That sentence is the real proof of identity.
— Book 23, husband and wife reunited
My own working translation.
The most moving recognition in the book rests not on a birthmark or a token but on a private fact only two people know. Twenty years on, a face can be faked; a bed no one can move cannot.
My note: the poem uses several layers of recognition — the dog knows its master, the scar knows an old acquaintance, and only this tree knows the marriage. The poet puts the deepest evidence in a piece of furniture.
Three recognitions, each deeper than the last
The old dog Argos knows him first and wags his tail and dies; the nurse sees the scar on his leg and knows him; his wife waits until he says the secret of the bed himself before she will believe. Each recognition comes nearer the heart, and each is harder than the last. “Coming home” is not pushing open a door; it is letting a self who has almost become a stranger walk back into his old place1.
Before you start: two small things
One is the edition. In translation, the spellings of people and gods differ greatly — Odysseus becomes Ulysses in some English versions, and Penelope’s name shifts shape too; mixing them gets confusing. Pick a version and read for smoothness first, then decide whether you want a second at hand. The other is method. The first four books have no hero and are easy to lose; read them as a story of the household in their own right, and when the hero walks on in Book Five, you can look back at who was holding things up while he was gone2.
4. What I Put to Use
- Make “home” the coordinate, not the adventure the map. After each stretch of the journey, ask whether he is nearer Ithaca or farther. Read that way, and the scattered episodes fall into one line.
- While Odysseus tells his own story, watch whom he is telling it to. Books Nine to Twelve are all his monologue, and his audience is the Phaeacians. He is building a version of events that makes him look well — the storyteller is also shaping himself.
- Follow the hidden thread of hospitality. Good hosts are rewarded, bad hosts come to grief; the Cyclops is the host turned inside out. The Greeks took “how you treat a guest” with the utmost seriousness, and this thread shows the human world more clearly than any monster.
5. Closing
Closing the book undid a prejudice: I had thought it a storybook of adventures. It is really a book about coming home, and it tells you that homecoming depends not on strength alone but on endurance, cunning, and a story someone is willing to believe. Its bravest moment is not the killing of a giant but the bed that no one can move.
Next: The Art of War. A book about coming home is done; the next is about winning without fighting. Odysseus turns his wit on the road; Sun Tzu turns wit toward avoiding the battlefield altogether. I want to see what that same cleverness becomes in a different use.
Footnotes
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On the “three recognitions”: dog, scar, bed, corresponding to the bystander, the family and the partner. Some readers hold that this tightening structure is the poem’s cleverest device for its theme of homecoming — the quicker the recognition, the shallower the return; the slower, the more secure the place. ↩
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On structure: the hero’s absence from the first four books is there to raise “home” and “the people who wait” first. Other scholars argue the Telemachy may not belong to the original poem; whatever the truth, reading it in the given order is still the easiest way. ↩
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