60 free The Odyssey trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
59 free The Odyssey trivia questions with answers. Homer's Odyssey is the original road-trip story, and this quiz follows it all the way home: Calypso's island, the Cyclops and the 'Nobody' trick, the bag of winds, Circe's pigs, the trip to the underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the cattle of the sun, and finally Ithaca - the dog Argos, the nurse's scar, the contest of the bow, and the bed carved from a living olive tree. It also covers the poem itself (its 24 books, its metre, the Telemachy and the Apologoi, the Homeric Question) and the afterlife of the story, from Joyce's Ulysses and O Brother, Where Art Thou? to Emily Wilson's translation and Christopher Nolan's film. Easy plot questions come first; the later ones will test a classics student. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and carries its source, so you can use the set for a literature class, a book club or a quiz night without worrying about a rogue fact.
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Q 01Odysseus rules which island kingdom?
Ithaca
Modern Ithaca in the Ionian Sea is generally accepted as his home, though some scholars argue Homer meant the Paliki peninsula of neighbouring Kefalonia.
Q 02How long does Odysseus's journey home from Troy take?
Ten years
Add the ten-year siege of Troy and he has been away twenty years by the time he reaches Penelope.
Q 03Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into how many books?
24
The division is credited to Alexandrian scholars centuries after Homer; each book was assigned a letter of the Greek alphabet.
Q 04In which poetic metre is the Odyssey composed?
Dactylic hexameter
Stock epithets like 'rosy-fingered Dawn' exist largely because they slot neatly into that metre, a boon for singers improvising aloud.
Q 05Roughly how many lines long is the Odyssey?
12,000
Emily Wilson's 2017 translation kept to exactly the same number of lines as the Greek, in iambic pentameter.
Q 06The Odyssey opens in medias res. Where is Odysseus when the poem begins?
Held captive by the nymph Calypso
The first four books follow his son Telemachus instead; Odysseus himself does not appear until Book 5.
Q 07Books 1 to 4 of the Odyssey, which follow Odysseus's son rather than Odysseus, are known as what?
The Telemachy
Telemachus sails to Pylos and Sparta for news, guided by Athena in disguise; the name of that disguise gave English the word 'mentor'.
Q 08How many suitors are besieging Penelope in Odysseus's palace, according to Telemachus's count?
108
He tallies them by home island: 52 from Dulichium, 24 from Same, 20 from Zacynthus and 12 from Ithaca itself.
Q 09What trick does Penelope use to stall the suitors for three years?
Unweaving a shroud each night
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.
Q 10For how many years does Calypso keep Odysseus on her island of Ogygia?
Seven
She offers him immortality to stay; Zeus finally sends Hermes to order his release, and he leaves on a raft he builds himself.
Q 11Calypso is usually said to be the daughter of which Titan?
Atlas
Her name comes from the Greek for 'to conceal', fitting for a nymph who hides a hero from the world for seven years.
Q 12Which god relentlessly persecutes Odysseus at sea?
Poseidon
The grudge is personal: Odysseus blinded Poseidon's son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, and then foolishly shouted his real name as he sailed away.
Q 13What name does Odysseus give the Cyclops Polyphemus?
Nobody
When the blinded giant bellows that Nobody is hurting him, the other Cyclopes assume he is being afflicted by the gods and wander off.
Q 21Elpenor, the youngest of Odysseus's crew, dies how?
Falling drunk from Circe's roof
His shade is the first Odysseus meets in Hades, begging for burial; Odysseus sails back to Aeaea and marks the grave with an oar.
Q 22How does Odysseus manage to hear the Sirens' song and survive?
Tied to the mast, crew's ears waxed
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.
Q 23Steering between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus loses how many men to Scylla?
Six
Q 14How do Odysseus and his men escape Polyphemus's cave?
Clinging beneath his sheep
The blinded giant feels the backs of each animal as it leaves but never checks underneath.
Q 15What does Aeolus, keeper of the winds, give Odysseus to speed him home?
An oxhide bag of storms
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.
Q 16Odysseus set out from Troy with twelve ships. How many survive the man-eating Laestrygonians?
One
The giants pelt the fleet with rocks inside their harbour and spear the men like fish; only Odysseus's ship, moored outside, gets away.
Q 17What does the enchantress Circe turn Odysseus's crew into?
Pigs
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.
Q 18Which god hands Odysseus the protective herb moly before he confronts Circe?
Hermes
Circe is a daughter of the sun god Helios; her island, Aeaea, later gives Odysseus his directions to the land of the dead.
Q 19Whose ghost does Odysseus travel to the underworld to consult?
Tiresias
He also meets his own mother, Anticlea, and learns for the first time that she has died while he was away.
Q 20Which dead hero tells Odysseus he would rather be a slave to a poor master than king of all the dead?
Achilles
It is a pointed reversal of the Iliad, where the same man chose a short glorious life over a long obscure one.
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.
Q 24Scylla and Charybdis have traditionally been located in which real stretch of water?
The Strait of Messina
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.
Q 25Odysseus's last ship is destroyed after his crew eat what?
The sun god's sacred cattle
Zeus answers Helios with a thunderbolt and every man drowns except Odysseus, who washes up on Calypso's island.
Q 26What grisly omen follows the slaughter of the sun god's cattle?
The hides crawl and the roasting meat bellows
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.
Q 27What happens to sailors who eat the fruit of the Lotus-eaters?
They forget their homes and want to stay
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.
Q 28Odysseus and his men make their first stop after Troy at Ismarus, the city of which Thracian tribe?
The Cicones
They sack it, linger to drink and feast, and are counter-attacked at a cost of six men per ship.
Q 29Naked and exhausted, Odysseus is found on the shore of Scheria by which princess?
Nausicaa
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.
Q 30Scheria, home of the Phaeacians who carry Odysseus home, is commonly identified with which Greek island?
Corfu
Their ships needed no pilots and steered by thought; Poseidon turned the one that delivered Odysseus to stone on its way back.