What you need before Book 1: what is prescribed, the world of the poem, Homer, the twenty-year gap, Odysseus’s route home, the order the story is told in, and the main characters.
This is a plain, page-by-page guide to what actually happens in the first four books of the Odyssey. It is here so that you can follow the story clearly before moving on to the themes, such as kleos, timē and the gods, all of which assume you already know who everyone is and what happens to them.
Each book is broken into short scenes, in the order they happen. Characters are introduced the first time they appear, with a short box explaining who they are.
Remember. You do not need to memorise any exact wording from the poem for this section. Focus on the story, the people, and why things happen.
Ten years ago, a huge Greek army finally captured the city of Troy, ending a war that had lasted a decade. One of the Greek commanders was Odysseus, king of the small island of Ithaca, famous among the Greeks above all for his cunning. It was Odysseus’s idea, a giant wooden horse left as a fake gift, that finally let the Greeks get inside Troy’s walls and win the war.
The war itself took ten years, and it ended ten years ago. Odysseus has now been away from home for twenty years in total, and for the last several of those years nobody on Ithaca has had any news of him at all. Most people assume he is dead.
A note on the gods. The Greek gods look and act like people: they argue, play favourites and hold grudges. They are, however, immortal and vastly more powerful. They watch human affairs closely and often intervene, sometimes openly and more often in disguise.
Back home, this absence has created a crisis. Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, has not remarried, because she still hopes he is alive. His son, Telemachus, was a baby when his father left and is now a young man, old enough to rule but with no real authority in his own house.
Meanwhile, a large group of young noblemen from Ithaca and the surrounding islands, the suitors, have moved into the royal household uninvited. They are trying to pressure Penelope into choosing one of them to marry, and in the meantime they are living in the palace at the family’s expense: eating their food, drinking their wine, and slowly using up everything Telemachus should one day inherit.
This is the situation the poem opens on. The Odyssey begins on Ithaca with Odysseus’s son, and Odysseus himself does not appear until Book 5.
The Odyssey is credited to a poet named Homer, but almost nothing certain is known about him. No reliable dates, birthplace or biography survive from his own time. Everything written about “Homer” as a person comes from centuries later, and much of it is legend. Several Greek cities claimed to be his birthplace, which itself suggests that no one really knew.
Key idea. “Homer” may represent one poet, several poets, or a whole tradition. The uncertainty is real, and the debate about it is usually called the Homeric Question.
The poems were composed within an oral tradition. Stories about the Trojan War and its heroes were told and retold by professional performers (bards, like Phemius in Book 1) for generations before anything was written down, changing slightly with each performance. Scholars now generally think the Iliad and the Odyssey took something close to their current shape around the 8th century BC, drawing on material that was already very old by then, and were only written down some time after that.
Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad covers a few weeks near the end of the Trojan War itself. The Odyssey picks up ten years later, after the war has ended, and follows the difficult journeys home.
This matters for how you read the poem. Repeated phrases, standard descriptions and familiar scene-types (a hero arriving as a guest, a feast, a recognition) are tools a performer relied on to compose and remember an enormously long story out loud, in front of a live audience, without a written script. They should not be read as signs of lazy writing.
One thing beginners often miss is that Odysseus has been away for twice as long as the Trojan War lasted. The war itself was only half of it.
Common mistake. Don’t assume Odysseus has spent this whole time on his journey home having adventures we simply haven’t read yet. By the time Books 1–4 take place, he has been stuck, unmoving, on Calypso’s island for seven of those ten years. His famous adventures (the Cyclops, the Sirens and so on) all happened earlier, in the first three years after Troy fell, and are only told in flashback much later in the poem.
These are the places Odysseus passes through on his way from Troy back to Ithaca, numbered in the order the events actually happen. Almost none of this is told directly in Books 1–4. During the Telemachy, Odysseus is stuck at stop 11, Calypso’s island, and has been there for seven years.
| # | Place | What happens there |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Troy | The war ends. Odysseus sets sail for home with twelve ships. |
| 2 | Ismarus | A raid on the Cicones goes badly; many men are lost. |
| 3 | Lotus-Eaters | Men who eat the lotus forget all desire to go home. |
| 4 | Cyclops | Odysseus blinds Polyphemus, earning Poseidon’s lasting hatred. |
| 5 | Aeolia | The wind-god gives Odysseus a bag of winds; the crew open it too early. |
| 6 | Laestrygonians | Giant cannibals destroy all the ships except one. |
| 7 | Circe | A sorceress turns his men into pigs; they stay a full year. |
| 8 | Land of the Dead | Odysseus visits the Underworld to learn how to get home. |
| 9 | Sirens | Odysseus has himself tied to the mast to survive their song. |
| 10 | Scylla & Charybdis | A monster and a whirlpool; more men are lost. |
| 11 | Calypso Books 1–4 | Shipwrecked and alone, he is kept here for seven years. Books 1–4 happen during this stay. |
| 12 | Phaeacia | Finally released, he is washed up here and tells his whole story to the court. |
| 13 | Ithaca | Home at last, but in disguise, with the suitors still in his hall. |
Not on this list. Telemachus’s own journey in Books 3–4 goes to Pylos and Sparta, both on the Greek mainland south-east of Ithaca. It is a short trip compared with his father’s.
This is one of the most important things to grasp before reading, and one of the easiest to get wrong. The Odyssey does not tell Odysseus’s story in the order it happened. It opens near the very end of his twenty-year absence, then jumps around in time. The famous adventures on the list of stops, numbers 2 to 11, are told later, by Odysseus himself, as a long flashback to an audience in Phaeacia.
Key idea. Story order and telling order are different things. The poem deliberately scrambles the first to create the second.
Starting a story in the middle of events, instead of at the beginning, is called starting in medias res, a Latin phrase meaning “into the middle of things”. It is one of the poem’s most influential features, and storytellers have copied it ever since.
| In story order (what happened, when) | In the poem’s order (how it is told, by book) |
|---|---|
| The Trojan War lasts ten years and ends. Odysseus sets sail. | (The war is not narrated in the Odyssey at all.) |
| Three years of adventures: Ismarus, the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops, Aeolia, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the Underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis. All his ships and men are lost. | Books 1–4: the Telemachy. Ithaca in crisis. Telemachus travels to Pylos and Sparta for news. Odysseus does not appear. |
| Seven years trapped on Calypso’s island, unable to leave. | Book 5. The gods order Odysseus’s release. He leaves Calypso, is shipwrecked by Poseidon, and washes up on Phaeacia. |
| Meanwhile on Ithaca, the suitors arrive and Telemachus grows up. (This is the Telemachy, Books 1–4.) | Books 6–8: Phaeacia. Odysseus is taken in by the royal family and treated as an honoured guest. |
| Odysseus is released, shipwrecked, and reaches Phaeacia, where he tells his story. | Books 9–12: the flashback. Odysseus tells the Phaeacians everything that happened to him between Troy and Calypso, including all the adventures on the list of stops. |
| He returns to Ithaca, takes his revenge, and reclaims his household. | Books 13–24. Odysseus returns to Ithaca in disguise, reunites with Telemachus, kills the suitors, and is finally recognised by Penelope. |
Remember. When the poem opens, the Cyclops, Circe and the Sirens are all already in Odysseus’s past. Nothing from stops 2–10 is still to come.
There are good reasons for Homer to arrange things like this instead of simply starting at Troy. Opening on Ithaca, with a household falling apart and a son who has never known his father, makes the stakes of the homecoming clear before we ever meet the man trying to make it.
Putting the adventures into Odysseus’s own mouth, told to a live audience, lets us hear him as a storyteller: cunning, persuasive, and possibly not always reliable. This tells us as much about him as the adventures themselves do.
Holding back the most famous episodes until the middle of the poem keeps the audience’s attention on the question that drives the whole story, which is whether Odysseus will get home.
Common mistake. Don’t describe Books 1–4 as “the start of Odysseus’s journey”. By the time the poem begins, his journey is almost over: nineteen of the twenty years have already passed, and he has been sitting on one island for seven of them.
These are the core people and gods to know before starting Book 1. More characters are introduced as they appear in each book.
Common mistake. Don’t treat Mentes and Mentor as real, independent characters. Both names refer to disguises Athene uses. When you see either name in Books 1–2, it is Athene acting, and no mortal adviser is involved.
Next. Now read Book 1 · Trouble at Home, the prescribed text, scene by scene.