The Odyssey Summary & ending explained

"Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy."

Every soldier who survived the war had gone home by now. Every one but him. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, was stuck on an island at the edge of the world, kept in a cave by a nymph who wanted to marry him. Up on Olympus, the gods talked it over. Poseidon, who hated him, was away. Athena, who loved him, seized her moment.

On Ithaca, the king's hall was loud with strangers. More than a hundred young lords sprawled on his chairs, ate his cattle, drank his wine and waited for his wife to choose one of them. Penelope had held them off for years. She had told them she would marry once she finished weaving a burial shroud for her husband's old father, Laertes. All day she wove. Every night, by torchlight, she unpicked it. The trick worked for more than three years, until one of her own maids gave her away.

At the door stood a visitor nobody had noticed arrive: a tall stranger with a bronze spear, calling himself Mentes, an old friend of the family. It was Athena in disguise. Telemachus, the king's son, saw the guest kept waiting and was ashamed. He brought the stranger in, found a seat away from the noise, and poured out his anger.

"They're eating us alive," he said. "And my father's bones are probably bleaching on some beach."

"He isn't dead," the stranger said. "Not yet. Go and ask the men who fought beside him. Find out. And if he's gone, come home and deal with these suitors yourself."

Then the visitor vanished, quick as a bird. Telemachus felt something new in his chest. Next morning, for the first time in his life, he stood up in the assembly and spoke like the man of the house. He demanded a ship.

The suitors laughed. Let the boy go sailing, they said. He would never dare.

That night, while they drank, Telemachus crept down to the harbour, where a ship and a crew were waiting in the dark.