Key themes
- Homecoming and identity
- Cunning versus brute force
- The gods and human agency
About this book
Odysseus spends ten years trying to reach home after the fall of Troy, battling the Cyclops, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe and the Phaeacians, while his wife Penelope holds off suitors in Ithaca and his son Telemachus comes of age. The foundational Western epic of homecoming, adventure and the enduring pull of the domestic.
One of the oldest surviving works of Western literature, the Odyssey is thought to have reached its written form in the 8th century BC, drawing on much older oral traditions.
Discussion questions
- Odysseus survives not by strength but by cunning and adaptability. Is he a hero you admire, or one you find morally slippery — and does the poem seem to care about the distinction?
- Penelope's patience and her own forms of cleverness are often underread. How do you see her as a parallel to Odysseus — and does she face a more constrained version of the same challenges?
- The gods intervene throughout — sometimes helping, sometimes obstructing. What role does divine intervention play in how the poem thinks about human responsibility?
- The poem is full of digressions — the stories of other heroes, the catalogue of the dead. What do these detours add to the central journey, rather than simply delaying it?
- The Odyssey is about returning home after an absence that has changed everyone. How does the poem handle the strangeness of homecoming — that both Odysseus and Ithaca are different?
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