The Odyssey Trivia
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109 free The Odyssey trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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.
30 of 109 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
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
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.
Q 03Like the Iliad, the Odyssey is divided into how many books?
24
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.
Q 04In which poetic metre is the Odyssey composed?
Dactylic hexameter
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.
Q 05Roughly how many lines long is the Odyssey?
12,000
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.
Q 06Where is Odysseus when the poem, which opens in medias res, begins?
Held captive by the nymph Calypso
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.
Q 07Books 1 to 4 of the Odyssey, which follow Odysseus's son rather than Odysseus, are known as what?
The Telemachy
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.
Q 08How many suitors are besieging Penelope in Odysseus's palace, according to Telemachus's count?
108
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.
Q 09What trick does Penelope use to stall the suitors for three years?
Unweaving a shroud each night
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.
Q 10For how many years does Calypso keep Odysseus on her island of Ogygia?
Seven
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.
Q 11Calypso is usually said to be the daughter of which Titan?
Atlas
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.
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
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.
Q 22How does Odysseus manage to hear the Sirens' song and survive?
Tied to the mast, crew's ears waxed
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.
Q 23Steering between Scylla and Charybdis, Odysseus loses how many men to Scylla?
Q 14How do Odysseus and his men escape Polyphemus's cave?
Clinging beneath his sheep
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.
Q 15What does Aeolus, keeper of the winds, give Odysseus to speed him home?
An oxhide bag of storms
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.
Q 16How many of Odysseus's ships survive the man-eating Laestrygonians?
One
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.
Q 17What does the enchantress Circe turn Odysseus's crew into?
Pigs
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.
Q 18Which god hands Odysseus the protective herb moly before he confronts Circe?
Hermes
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.
Q 19Whose ghost does Odysseus travel to the underworld to consult?
Tiresias
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.
Q 20Which dead hero tells Odysseus he would rather be a slave to a poor master than king of all the dead?
Achilles
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.
Six
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.
Q 24Scylla and Charybdis have traditionally been located in which real stretch of water?
The Strait of Messina
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.
Q 25Odysseus's last ship is destroyed after his crew eat what?
The sun god's sacred cattle
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.
Q 26What grisly omen follows the slaughter of the sun god's cattle?
The hides crawl and the roasting meat bellows
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.
Q 27What happens to sailors who eat the fruit of the Lotus-eaters?
They forget their homes and want to stay
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.
Q 28Odysseus and his men make their first stop after Troy at Ismarus, the city of which Thracian tribe?
The Cicones
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.
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
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.