59 Fun Facts About The Odyssey

Odysseus rules which island kingdom?

Modern Ithaca in the Ionian Sea is generally accepted as his home, though some scholars argue Homer meant the Paliki peninsula of neighbouring Kefalonia.

How long does Odysseus's journey home from Troy take?

Ten years pass between the fall of Troy and Odysseus's return; added to the ten-year siege, he has been away twenty years when he finally reaches Penelope.

Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into how many books?

24 books, one per letter of the Greek alphabet (capitals for the Iliad, lower-case for the Odyssey), a division credited to Alexandrian scholars centuries after Homer.

In which poetic metre is the Odyssey composed?

Dactylic hexameter, lines built from dactyls (long-short-short) and spondees (long-long), is the metre of both Homeric epics; stock epithets like 'rosy-fingered Dawn' survive largely because they slot neatly into it.

Roughly how many lines long is the Odyssey?

12,000 lines, more precisely 12,109 in the standard Greek text, makes the Odyssey about three-quarters the length of the Iliad's roughly 15,700 lines.

Where is Odysseus when the poem, which opens in medias res, begins?

Held captive by the nymph Calypso on Ogygia is where the poem finds Odysseus; he does not appear in person until Book 5, after four books following his son.

Books 1 to 4 of the Odyssey, which follow Odysseus's son rather than Odysseus, are known as what?

The Telemachy is the scholars' name for Books 1 to 4, in which Telemachus sails to Pylos and Sparta seeking news of his father and comes of age in the process.

How many suitors are besieging Penelope in Odysseus's palace, according to Telemachus's count?

108 suitors is Telemachus's tally in Book 16, counted island by island: 52 from Dulichium alone, with the rest from Same, Zacynthus and Odysseus's own island.

What trick does Penelope use to stall the suitors for three years?

Unweaving a shroud each night is her ruse: the shroud is for Odysseus's father Laertes, and she promises to choose a husband once it is finished, undoing each day's weaving until a maid betrays her.

For how many years does Calypso keep Odysseus on her island of Ogygia?

Seven years is how long Calypso holds him on Ogygia, offering immortality if he stays; Zeus finally orders his release, and he leaves on a raft he builds himself.

Calypso is usually said to be the daughter of which Titan?

Atlas, the Titan who holds up the sky, is named as Calypso's father in Book 1; her own name comes from the Greek kalyptein, 'to conceal', fitting for a nymph who hides a hero from the world.

Which god relentlessly persecutes Odysseus at sea?

The grudge is personal: Odysseus blinded Poseidon's son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, and then foolishly shouted his real name as he sailed away.

What name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus?

When the blinded giant bellows that Nobody is hurting him, the other Cyclopes assume he is being afflicted by the gods and wander off.

How do Odysseus and his men escape Polyphemus's cave?

Clinging beneath his sheep, each man tied under the middle ram of three, they slip out while the blinded giant feels only the animals' backs; Odysseus himself hangs under the largest ram.

What does Aeolus, keeper of the winds, give Odysseus to speed him home?

An oxhide bag of storms, holding every wind but the favourable west wind, is Aeolus's gift; within sight of home the crew open it looking for treasure, are blown back, and Aeolus refuses a second time.

How many of Odysseus's ships survive the man-eating Laestrygonians?

One ship, Odysseus's own, survives because he moored it outside the harbour; the giants pelt the other eleven with rocks inside and spear the men like fish.

What does the enchantress Circe turn Odysseus's crew into?

Pigs is what Circe's drugged wine makes of the scouting party, though they keep their human minds; once Odysseus resists her spell the men are restored and the crew stay a full year.

Which god hands Odysseus the protective herb moly before he confronts Circe?

Hermes, disguised as a young man, meets Odysseus on the way to Circe's house and gives him moly, a black-rooted, white-flowered herb that makes him immune to her potion.

Whose ghost does Odysseus travel to the underworld to consult?

Tiresias, the blind Theban prophet, is the shade Circe sends him to consult; he also meets his mother Anticlea there and learns for the first time that she has died.

Which dead hero tells Odysseus he would rather be a slave to a poor master than king of all the dead?

Achilles says it in Book 11, a pointed reversal of the Iliad, where the same hero chose a short, glorious life over a long, obscure one.

Elpenor, the youngest of Odysseus's crew, dies how?

Falling drunk from Circe's roof, where he had slept and then missed the ladder, kills Elpenor; his shade is the first Odysseus meets in Hades, and his grave on Aeaea is marked with his oar.

How does Odysseus manage to hear the Sirens' song and survive?

Tied to the mast, crew's ears waxed: Circe's advice lets Odysseus alone hear the song while the men row on, ordered to tighten his ropes if he begs release; Homer's dual forms imply just two Sirens.

Steering between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus loses how many men to Scylla?

Six men, one per head, are snatched by the six-headed Scylla; Circe had told him to hug her cliff rather than risk the whole ship in Charybdis's whirlpool.

Scylla and Charybdis have traditionally been located in which real stretch of water?

The Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily, is where tradition since Virgil's Aeneid has put them; the idiom 'between Scylla and Charybdis' lives on as a synonym for a rock and a hard place.

Odysseus's last ship is destroyed after his crew eat what?

The sun god's sacred cattle, grazing on Thrinacia, are slaughtered by the starving crew; Zeus answers Helios with a thunderbolt and every man drowns except Odysseus, who washes up on Calypso's island.

What grisly omen follows the slaughter of the sun god's cattle?

The hides crawl and the roasting meat bellows like living cattle after the slaughter; Eurylochus had talked the hungry crew into it while Odysseus slept, despite the warnings he had been given to leave the herd alone.

What happens to sailors who eat the fruit of the Lotus-eaters?

They forget their homes and want to stay, weeping when dragged away; Odysseus lashes them under the rowing benches, and the historian Polybius placed the Lotus-eaters on Djerba, off Tunisia.

Odysseus and his men make their first stop after Troy at Ismarus, the city of which Thracian tribe?

The Cicones, allies of Troy, are sacked at Ismarus, but the crew linger to drink and feast and a counter-attack costs men from every ship; the wine of their priest Maron later fells Polyphemus.

Naked and exhausted, Odysseus is found on the shore of Scheria by which princess?

She had come to the river to wash clothes with her handmaidens; Hayao Miyazaki later borrowed her name for the heroine of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.

Scheria, home of the Phaeacians who carry Odysseus home, is commonly identified with which Greek island?

Corfu, ancient Kerkyra, is the usual identification; the Phaeacians' ships needed no pilots and steered by thought, and the one that delivered Odysseus was turned to stone on its way home.

Books 9 to 12, in which Odysseus tells the Phaeacians of his wanderings, are known collectively as what?

The Apologoi, 'the tales', is the name for Books 9 to 12, where everything from the Cyclops to Calypso is a flashback told by Odysseus himself, which some readers take as licence to doubt him.

Who is the first to recognise Odysseus when he comes home disguised as a beggar?

His dog Argos, old and flea-ridden on a dung heap, pricks up his ears and wags his tail at his master after twenty years, then dies; Odysseus wipes away a tear.

Odysseus's old nurse Eurycleia recognises him by what?

A scar above his knee, left by a boar's tusk on a boyhood hunt on Mount Parnassus, gives him away as Eurycleia washes his feet; he seizes her by the throat and swears her to silence.

What is the occupation of Eumaeus, the loyal servant who first shelters the returning Odysseus?

Swineherd is his job: he keeps Odysseus's herds of swine in the hills, though he was born a prince on the island of Syra, kidnapped by Phoenician traders and bought by Odysseus's father Laertes.

Penelope's contest for the suitors requires stringing Odysseus's bow and shooting an arrow through what?

Twelve axe heads are set in a row and the arrow must pass through them all; none of the suitors can even bend the bow, and the ragged beggar strings it with ease.

Which suitor is the first to die when Odysseus turns his bow on the hall?

Antinous, the most arrogant of the suitors, takes the first arrow through the throat as he lifts his cup; his father Eupeithes leads the failed revenge raid in the final book.

Besides Odysseus and Telemachus, which two servants fight the suitors?

Eumaeus and Philoetius, the two loyal herdsmen, arm themselves beside Odysseus and Telemachus; the disloyal goatherd Melanthius sides with the suitors and is mutilated for it.

Which goddess guides Odysseus and Telemachus throughout the poem, appearing as Mentes and Mentor?

Athena, Odysseus's patron, also disguises him as an old beggar on his return and, at the very end, steps in to halt the blood feud with the suitors' families.

Who was Mentor, the Odyssey character whose name gave English the word 'mentor'?

Odysseus's old friend, left in charge at home when the king sailed for Troy, is who Mentor was; the modern sense of the word was popularised by Fenelon's 1699 novel Les Aventures de Telemaque.

Whom does Telemachus visit in Sparta when seeking news of his father?

Menelaus and Helen host him in Sparta in Book 4; Menelaus recounts wrestling the shape-shifting sea god Proteus in Egypt to learn the way home, and Helen drugs the wine to banish grief.

What does the name Telemachus mean?

Far from battle is the literal sense of Telemachus, from tele, 'far', and mache, 'fight', apt for a boy who was an infant when his father left for the war.

According to the lost epic the Telegony, how does Odysseus finally die?

Speared by his own son with a stingray-spine weapon: Telegonus, his child by Circe, kills him during a raid without knowing who he is, then marries Penelope while Telemachus marries Circe.

Which sea goddess lends Odysseus a veil that keeps him afloat after his raft is smashed in a storm?

Ino, called Leucothea, the 'white goddess', was a mortal Theban princess, daughter of Cadmus, deified after leaping into the sea; her veil carries Odysseus to the Phaeacian shore.

Which Phaeacian bard sings of the Trojan Horse while Odysseus weeps in Book 8?

Demodocus, the blind bard of the Phaeacian court, sings of the wooden horse at King Alcinous's feast; Odysseus, its architect, weeps at the memory and is asked to reveal his name.

Who exposed the feigned madness Odysseus used to dodge the Trojan War?

Palamedes, with baby Telemachus laid in front of the plough, exposed him: Odysseus swerved to save the child and gave the game away, and later engineered Palamedes's death in revenge.

Who gave Odysseus his name, choosing it because he had 'been angered with many'?

His grandfather Autolycus, a famous thief and trickster visiting for the baby's naming, chose the name from the verb odyssomai, 'to be angry with', a fitting forebear for so cunning a hero.

Dante's Inferno places Odysseus (Ulysses) in the Eighth Circle among which sinners?

Counsellors of fraud share the eighth bolgia with him, each wrapped in a flame, for the Trojan Horse and other deceits; Dante has him die on a last voyage past the Pillars of Hercules, an ending Tennyson reused in 'Ulysses'.

Which translator's 2017 Odyssey was the first English verse translation by a woman?

Emily Wilson's translation matched Homer line for line in iambic pentameter and opened with 'Tell me about a complicated man'; her Iliad followed in 2023.

Which poet's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' celebrates Chapman's translation?

John Keats wrote 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' in October 1816 after a night reading the Elizabethan translation with his friend Charles Cowden Clarke; it ends with 'stout Cortez' silent upon a peak in Darien.

What is the 'Homeric Question'?

Whether one poet named Homer wrote both epics, or existed at all, is the Homeric Question; Milman Parry's 1930s fieldwork showed the poems were built from oral formulas, suggesting generations of bards rather than a single author.

On which date is James Joyce's Ulysses, a Dublin retelling of the Odyssey, set?

16 June 1904, celebrated as Bloomsday, was the day of Joyce's first outing with Nora Barnacle; Leopold Bloom is Odysseus, Stephen Dedalus is Telemachus and Molly is Penelope.

Who plays Ulysses Everett McGill in the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

George Clooney plays the silver-tongued escaped convict, with John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson as his chain-gang companions; John Goodman's one-eyed Bible salesman Big Dan Teague stands in for the Cyclops.

In the 1954 Italian film Ulysses, Kirk Douglas's co-star Silvana Mangano plays which two roles?

Penelope and Circe are both Silvana Mangano in the 1954 film, a double casting that makes the enchantress a mirror of the faithful wife; Anthony Quinn plays the chief suitor.

Who plays Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's 2026 film The Odyssey?

Matt Damon leads as Odysseus, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus; Nolan billed it as the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm cameras.

Who played Odysseus in the Emmy-winning 1997 NBC miniseries The Odyssey?

Armand Assante took the lead opposite Greta Scacchi's Penelope; Andrei Konchalovsky won the Emmy for directing, with Bernadette Peters as Circe and Vanessa Williams as Calypso.

Which 2003 film, set in the American Civil War, was structured on the Odyssey?

Cold Mountain, Anthony Minghella's 2003 film of Charles Frazier's novel, follows a wounded Confederate deserter's long walk home to his sweetheart, a journey Frazier modelled on the Odyssey.

Odysseus's most famous epithet, polytropos, is usually translated as what?

Man of many ways is Lattimore's rendering of polytropos, 'much-turned'; it is the very first adjective of the poem, applied in line one before the hero is even named.

Which king does Telemachus visit first, at sandy Pylos, in search of news of his father?

Nestor, the garrulous old king of Pylos, hosts Telemachus in Book 3 and sends his son Peisistratus along as companion for the overland trip to Sparta.

Who edited the first printed Greek edition of Homer, published in Florence in 1488?

Demetrios Chalkokondyles, an Athens-born scholar teaching in Florence, edited the 1488 editio princeps of Homer, financed by the Nerli brothers of that city.