Odyssey

The Odyssey, the companion epic to the Iliad attributed to Homer and composed around 725 BCE, follows the ten-year homeward journey of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin) from Troy to his island kingdom of Ithaca. Where the Iliad is a poem of the battlefield — of glory, wrath, and grief among warriors — the Odyssey is a poem of survival, cunning, endurance, and homecoming. Its hero is defined not by physical strength or martial fury but by intelligence (the epithet polytropos, 'of many ways' or 'much-traveled,' opens the poem), adaptability, storytelling ability, and the tenacious desire to return home.

The poem opens not with Odysseus but with his son Telemachus, who has grown up in his father's twenty-year absence and is being pressured by the suitors who have occupied his palace, consuming his estate, and pressing his mother Penelope to choose a new husband. The goddess Athena appears to Telemachus and counsels him to seek news of his father. This opening establishes the poem's governing situation: the proper household in disorder, the faithful wife under siege, the legitimate heir unable to claim his inheritance. The entire poem moves toward the restoration of this disrupted order.

The Odyssey's adventures, told in Books 9-12 in Odysseus's own retrospective narration, are among the most famous stories in Western literature: the Cyclops Polyphemus; the witch Circe who transforms men into pigs; the land of the dead where Odysseus consults the shades of the deceased; the Sirens whose song lures sailors to destruction; Scylla and Charybdis; and the sacred Cattle of the Sun, whose slaughter by his companions costs Odysseus all his remaining crew. For students of the Bible, these adventures illuminate the Greek imagination's vision of death, temptation, divine power, and the nature of human identity in ways that contrast productively with biblical perspectives.

• Isaiah 40-55 (the promise of homecoming from exile as the governing metaphor of restoration)
• Luke 15:11-32 (the prodigal son: homecoming, recognition, restoration — the gospel parallel to the Odyssey's governing narrative)
• John 20-21 (resurrection recognition scenes parallel the Odyssey's recognition narratives)
• Acts 17:31-32 (the resurrection proclamation as scandalous to Greek audiences shaped by the Homeric afterlife)
• Revelation 21:1-4 (the eschatological homecoming as the Bible's ultimate answer to the Odyssey's homecoming theme)

The Odyssey contains one of literature's most faithful characters: Argos, Odysseus's old dog, who waits twenty years for his master's return, recognizes him when he returns in disguise, wags his tail once, and then dies. This brief scene — just fifteen lines — has moved readers to tears for nearly three thousand years and is often cited as the first appearance of a dog as a symbol of loyal friendship in Western literature.