60 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?

Add the ten-year siege of Troy and he has been away twenty years by the time he reaches Penelope.

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

The division is credited to Alexandrian scholars centuries after Homer; each book was assigned a letter of the Greek alphabet.

In which poetic metre is the Odyssey composed?

Stock epithets like 'rosy-fingered Dawn' exist largely because they slot neatly into that metre, a boon for singers improvising aloud.

Roughly how many lines long is the Odyssey?

Emily Wilson's 2017 translation kept to exactly the same number of lines as the Greek, in iambic pentameter.

The Odyssey opens in medias res. Where is Odysseus when the poem begins?

The first four books follow his son Telemachus instead; Odysseus himself does not appear until Book 5.

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

Telemachus sails to Pylos and Sparta for news, guided by Athena in disguise; the name of that disguise gave English the word 'mentor'.

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

He tallies them by home island: 52 from Dulichium, 24 from Same, 20 from Zacynthus and 12 from Ithaca itself.

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

The shroud is for Odysseus's father Laertes; she promises to choose a husband once it is finished and undoes her day's work every night until a maid betrays her.

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

She offers him immortality to stay; Zeus finally sends Hermes to order his release, and he leaves on a raft he builds himself.

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

Her name comes from the Greek for 'to conceal', fitting for a nymph who hides a hero from the world for seven years.

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?

The blinded giant feels the backs of each animal as it leaves but never checks underneath.

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

Within sight of home the crew, suspecting hidden treasure, open the oxhide bag and are blown all the way back; Aeolus refuses to help twice.

Odysseus set out from Troy with twelve ships. How many survive the man-eating Laestrygonians?

The giants pelt the fleet with rocks inside their harbour and spear the men like fish; only Odysseus's ship, moored outside, gets away.

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

Hermes gives Odysseus the herb moly to resist her potion; the men are restored, and the crew end up staying on her island a full year.

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

Circe is a daughter of the sun god Helios; her island, Aeaea, later gives Odysseus his directions to the land of the dead.

Whose ghost does Odysseus travel to the underworld to consult?

He also meets his own mother, Anticlea, and learns for the first time that she has died while he was away.

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

It is a pointed reversal of the Iliad, where the same man chose a short glorious life over a long obscure one.

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

His shade is the first Odysseus meets in Hades, begging for burial; Odysseus sails back to Aeaea and marks the grave with an oar.

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

Homer gives no names for the Sirens and numbers them at just two; the fish-tailed image came much later - early Greek art shows them as birds with women's heads.

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

Circe told him to hug Scylla's cliff rather than risk the whole ship in Charybdis's whirlpool; the six-headed monster takes one man per head.

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

Virgil places them between Calabria and Sicily in the Aeneid; the idiom 'between Scylla and Charybdis' survives as a synonym for a rock and a hard place.

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

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?

Both Tiresias and Circe had warned Odysseus to steer clear of the island; his second-in-command Eurylochus talked the hungry crew into it while he slept.

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

Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships and lash them under the benches; the ancient historian Polybius placed the island at Djerba, off Tunisia.

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

They sack it, linger to drink and feast, and are counter-attacked at a cost of six men per ship.

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?

Their ships needed no pilots and steered by thought; Poseidon turned the one that delivered Odysseus to stone on its way back.

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

Everything from the Cyclops to Calypso is a flashback narrated 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?

The old hound, neglected on a dung heap and full of fleas, wags his tail at his master after twenty years and dies; Odysseus wipes away a tear.

Odysseus's old nurse Eurycleia recognises him by what?

He got the scar from a boar while hunting with his grandfather Autolycus as a boy; 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?

He was born a prince on the island of Syra, kidnapped as a child 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?

None of the suitors can even bend the bow; the ragged beggar does it easily and turns the next arrow on Antinous.

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

He is also the first suitor to speak in the poem; his father Eupeithes leads the failed revenge raid in the final book.

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

The swineherd and the cowherd; the disloyal goatherd Melanthius sides with the suitors and pays for it.

Penelope tests the man claiming to be Odysseus by ordering their bed moved. Why is that impossible?

Only Odysseus knows the bed is rooted to the floor; his outrage at the idea convinces her.

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

She also disguises Odysseus as an old beggar and, at the very end, steps in to stop the blood feud with the suitors' families.

The English word 'mentor' comes from a character in the Odyssey. Who was Mentor?

A goddess borrows his form to guide Telemachus; the modern sense of the word was popularised by Fenelon's 1699 novel Les Aventures de Telemaque.

Telemachus visits two veterans of Troy for news of his father. Whom does he see in Sparta?

Menelaus recounts wrestling the shape-shifting sea god Proteus in Egypt to learn the way home.

What does the name Telemachus mean?

Apt for a boy who was an infant when the war began; in the lost sequel the Telegony he ends up marrying Circe.

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

Telegonus, his son by Circe, kills him without knowing who he is; Telegonus then marries Penelope and Telemachus marries Circe.

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

She was a mortal Theban princess, daughter of Cadmus, who was transformed into the 'white goddess' after her death.

Contrary to popular belief, the Trojan Horse is not described in the Iliad. Where does Homer mention it?

The Phaeacian bard Demodocus sings of it while Odysseus, its architect, sits weeping in the audience.

Odysseus feigned madness, ploughing his fields with salt, to dodge the Trojan War. Who exposed him?

Odysseus swerved to save the child and gave the game away; he later engineered Palamedes's death in revenge.

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

Autolycus was a famous thief and trickster, a fitting grandfather for the man of many wiles.

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

Dante has him die not at home but on a last voyage past the Pillars of Hercules, an ending Tennyson borrowed for his poem 'Ulysses'.

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

She kept to the same number of lines as Homer and opened with 'Tell me about a complicated man'; her Iliad followed in 2023.

The first complete English translation of the Odyssey, by George Chapman, appeared in which year?

Keats's sonnet 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' was written two centuries later, in 1816.

What is the 'Homeric Question'?

Milman Parry's work in the 1930s showed the poems were built from oral formulas, suggesting generations of bards rather than a single author.

James Joyce's Ulysses maps the Odyssey onto a single day in Dublin. Which date?

Fans celebrate it as Bloomsday; 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?

The Coens admitted they had never read the poem; 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?

Anthony Quinn plays the suitor Antinous; the double casting makes the enchantress a mirror of the faithful wife.

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

It was billed as the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70 mm cameras, with Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Zendaya as Athena.

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

Andrei Konchalovsky directed; Isabella Rossellini was Athena and Vanessa Williams played Calypso.

Why did Stanley Kubrick borrow the word 'Odyssey' for the title of his 1968 film 2001?

The word had already drifted into English to mean any long, eventful journey - exactly what Kubrick's astronauts undertake.

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

Emily Wilson rendered it 'complicated'; the epithet is the very first adjective of the poem, applied before the hero is even named.

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

The garrulous old king sends his son Peisistratus along as Telemachus's companion for the overland trip to Sparta.

Who produced the first printed Greek edition of the Odyssey, published in Milan in 1488?

The Athens-born scholar, then resident in Florence, had studied in Constantinople before bringing Homer to the press.