What happens, who does it, and what the characters themselves say — without interpretation.
Everything below is stated in the poem. Where a claim is made by a character rather than by the narrator, the character is named — several of them contradict each other, and Books 9–10 are spoken by Odysseus himself.
The poet asks the to sing of the man of many turns, who wandered after sacking Troy, saw many cities, and failed to save his companions: they died because they ate the cattle of Helios, and the god took away their homecoming.
Odysseus is held on an island by the nymph Calypso, who wants him as her husband. Poseidon is away among the Ethiopians. The other gods assemble, and Zeus speaks of Aegisthus: Hermes warned him not to kill Agamemnon or court Clytemnestra, he did both, and Orestes killed him. Athena raises Odysseus's case; Zeus agrees to send Hermes to Calypso while Athena goes to Ithaca.
Athena arrives disguised as Mentes, lord of the Taphians, saying she is sailing to Temese for copper. The suitors are playing draughts and eating. Telemachus seats her apart, serves food, and only then asks who she is. He says his mother calls him Odysseus's son but no man knows his own begetting. Mentes says Odysseus is alive and held on a sea-girt island, and predicts he will return within the year. She tells Telemachus to call an , denounce the suitors, and sail to Pylos and Sparta for news; if he learns his father is dead, to raise a mound, hold funeral rites, marry off his mother, and then kill the suitors. She cites Orestes' revenge, and departs like a bird.
The Phemius sings of the Achaeans' return from Troy. Penelope comes down and asks for another song. Telemachus tells her Zeus allots men their fates, that audiences favour the newest song, and that speech is men's concern, his most of all, since the power in the house is his. She goes back upstairs and weeps for Odysseus until Athena puts her to sleep. Telemachus tells the suitors there will be an assembly at dawn. Antinous and Eurymachus answer him. Eurycleia, daughter of Ops, whom Laertes bought for twenty oxen, lights him to bed.
Aegyptius speaks first and asks who has called the assembly; his son Antiphus had sailed with Odysseus and was killed by the Cyclops. Telemachus takes the staff and states his case: the suitors court his mother against her will instead of going to her father Icarius and offering bride-gifts, and they are consuming his house. He strikes the ground with the staff and weeps.
Antinous replies that the fault is Penelope's. For three years she has put the suitors off by weaving a shroud for Laertes, unravelling it each night; in the fourth year one of her women told them, and she was made to finish it. The suitors will not leave, he says, until she marries. Telemachus answers that he cannot send his mother away: he would have to repay Icarius, and she would call down the Furies on him.
Zeus sends two eagles that fly at each other and tear at their own heads and necks above the assembly. Halitherses son of Mastor interprets the sign as Odysseus's return and reminds them he foretold twenty years of absence. Eurymachus dismisses the , tells him to go prophesy to his children, and threatens him with a fine. Mentor, whom Odysseus left in charge of the house, rebukes the Ithacans for sitting silent. Leocritus breaks up the assembly.
Telemachus prays by the sea; Athena comes in Mentor's shape and promises a ship. She obtains one from Noemon and gathers a crew. Telemachus has Eurycleia prepare twelve jars of wine and twenty measures of barley meal, and swears her not to tell Penelope for eleven or twelve days unless Penelope asks. Athena sends the suitors to sleep, then a following wind, and the ship sails at night.
They reach Pylos during a sacrifice to Poseidon: nine companies of five hundred men, nine bulls apiece. Peisistratus, Nestor's son, seats them on fleeces, gives them entrails and wine, and hands the cup first to Mentor, the elder. Athena prays aloud to Poseidon. Only after the meal does Nestor ask who they are.
Nestor's account: Troy fell, Athena set the sons of Atreus quarrelling, and they called an assembly at sunset with the men drunk. Menelaus urged sailing home, Agamemnon to stay and sacrifice to Athena. The army split. Nestor, Diomedes, and Menelaus sailed to Tenedos, where Odysseus turned back to rejoin Agamemnon. Nestor reached home without trouble. He reports that Neoptolemus, Philoctetes, and Idomeneus also returned, and that Agamemnon was killed by Aegisthus. Of Odysseus he says he knows nothing.
He tells the Aegisthus story at length: while the army was at Troy, Aegisthus courted Clytemnestra, who at first refused, and there was a bard set to guard her whom Aegisthus marooned on a desert island to be eaten by birds. He took her to his own house, ruled Mycenae seven years after killing Agamemnon, and in the eighth Orestes came back from Athens and killed him. Menelaus arrived from his wanderings on the day of the funeral feast. Nestor tells Telemachus not to stay long away from home, and says it is a fine thing when a son survives a man.
Athena leaves in the form of a sea-eagle, and Nestor, recognizing her, vows a yearling heifer with gold laid on its horns. The next day Laerces the goldsmith gilds the horns and the heifer is sacrificed; Nestor's youngest daughter Polycaste bathes Telemachus and rubs him with oil. He drives to Sparta with Peisistratus, staying overnight at Pherae with Diocles.
They reach Sparta during a double wedding: Menelaus is sending his daughter Hermione to Achilles' son, and taking a bride for his son Megapenthes, born of a slave woman. Eteoneus asks whether to receive the strangers or send them on; Menelaus rebukes him and has them brought in. Telemachus remarks on the gold, amber, silver, and ivory; Menelaus says no mortal can rival Zeus, that he gathered his wealth over seven years of wandering, and that his brother was killed at home meanwhile. He says he grieves for Odysseus above all, and Telemachus weeps into his cloak.
Helen comes in, says the young man must be Odysseus's son, and puts a drug into the wine — nepenthe, given her in Egypt by Polydamna, wife of Thon — so that no one weeps that day. She tells how Odysseus disguised himself as a beggar, entered Troy, and was recognized only by her, who bathed him and swore not to tell, and says her heart had already turned back to home. Menelaus tells how Helen came to the wooden horse with Deiphobus, walked round it, and called out to the men inside in the voices of their wives, and how Odysseus held them back from answering.
Next morning Menelaus tells of Egypt. Becalmed at Pharos, he was approached by Eidothea, daughter of Proteus, who told him to seize her father. Four of them hid under sealskins, with ambrosia under their noses against the smell, and caught the old man at noon among his seals. He turned into a lion, a serpent, a leopard, a boar, running water, and a leafy tree. Held fast, he told Menelaus he must sacrifice in Egypt before sailing, and gave him news: Ajax son of Oileus drowned at the Gyrae rocks after boasting he had escaped the sea against the gods' will; Agamemnon was killed by Aegisthus on his return; and Odysseus is alive on an island, weeping, kept by the nymph Calypso, without ship or crew. Proteus also said Menelaus would not die in Argos but be sent to the Elysian plain, because he is Helen's husband and Zeus's son-in-law.
On Ithaca, Noemon asks Antinous when his ship will return and reveals Telemachus's voyage. Antinous takes twenty men and a ship to wait in the strait by Asteris and kill him on the way back. The herald Medon overhears and tells Penelope, who had not known her son was gone. Eurycleia admits she helped and urges her to pray to Athena. Penelope prays, and Athena sends a phantom in the shape of her sister Iphthime, which says Telemachus will return but refuses to say whether Odysseus is alive.
The gods meet again. Athena repeats that Odysseus is held on Calypso's island and that the suitors plan to kill his son. Zeus sends Hermes with the order to release him: he is to reach Scheria, the land of the Phaeacians, on a raft, alone, after twenty days, and they will send him home with gifts.
Hermes finds the cave: a fire of cedar and juniper, a wood of alder, poplar, and cypress, owls, falcons and cormorants nesting, a vine heavy with grapes, four springs, and meadows of violet and parsley. Odysseus is on the shore, weeping and looking at the sea, as he does every day. Calypso says the gods begrudge goddesses their mortal lovers, citing Orion and Dawn, and Iasion and Demeter, but agrees to obey.
She tells Odysseus he may go, and offers to make him immortal and ageless if he stays. He answers that Penelope is mortal and cannot match her in form or stature, that he still wants to go home, and that if a god wrecks him he will endure it, having suffered much already. He asks her to swear she is not plotting against him, and she swears. That night they sleep together in the cave.
She gives him a bronze axe and an adze, and shows him twenty dry trees — alder, poplar, fir. He cuts and fits them, makes a deck, mast, yard, and steering oar, and she brings cloth for a sail; the raft is finished on the fourth day and he sails on the fifth. For seventeen days he steers by the Pleiades, Boötes, and the Bear, keeping it on his left. On the eighteenth he sights the hills of Scheria.
Poseidon, returning from the Ethiopians, sees him and drives the east, south, west, and north winds together. Odysseus says he wishes he had died at Troy with rites and fame. The raft breaks; Calypso's clothes drag him down. Ino Leucothea, once a mortal woman, surfaces and gives him her veil, telling him to strip, leave the raft, and swim, then throw the veil back into the sea without looking. He suspects a trap and stays on the timbers until they are smashed, then obeys. He swims two days and two nights, is nearly dashed on the rocks and tears his hands, and is carried to a river mouth, whose god holds back the current. He throws the veil into the river, crawls into a thicket where a wild olive and a cultivated olive grow from one stem, and buries himself in leaves.
Athena goes to the palace of Alcinous and stands over Nausicaa in a dream, taking the form of the daughter of Dymas. She says the girl's clothes lie dirty, her marriage is near, and she should wash them at dawn. Nausicaa asks her father for the mule wagon and mentions her brothers' clothes, not her own marriage; Alcinous grants it. Her mother packs food and gives her olive oil in a golden flask.
At the washing pools they clean the clothes, bathe, eat, and play ball. A throw goes wide into the river and the girls cry out, waking Odysseus. He comes out of the bushes holding a branch, caked with brine; the poet compares him to a mountain lion that goes after flocks in the rain and wind, driven by hunger. The girls scatter; only Nausicaa stands, Athena having put courage in her.
Odysseus decides not to clasp her knees but to speak from a distance. He asks whether she is a goddess or mortal, says she is like Artemis, compares her to a young palm shoot he saw at Delos, describes his twenty days at sea, and wishes her a husband and a home of one mind, which he calls a grief to enemies and a joy to friends. Nausicaa replies that Zeus gives fortune as he pleases and that strangers and beggars come from Zeus. She calls the maids back and gives him clothing and oil. He bathes out of sight, refusing to be washed by the girls, and Athena makes him taller and stronger and pours grace over his head and shoulders. Nausicaa tells her maids she would like such a man for a husband.
She tells him to follow the wagon to the edge of town, then wait in the grove of Athena while she goes ahead, because the Phaeacians gossip and would talk if she were seen with a stranger. In the palace he is to pass Alcinous and take hold of the knees of her mother Arete. Odysseus waits in the grove and prays to Athena, who hears him but does not appear, out of regard for Poseidon.
Athena meets him as a young girl carrying a pitcher and pours mist around him so no Phaeacian will see or question him. She gives the genealogy: Nausithous fathered Rhexenor and Alcinous; Rhexenor died leaving one daughter, Arete, whom Alcinous married and honours as no other woman on earth is honoured, and she settles disputes even among men. She warns that the Phaeacians do not take kindly to strangers.
The palace has bronze walls with a frieze of blue, gold doors on silver posts, a silver lintel, and gold and silver dogs made by Hephaestus on either side, deathless and unageing. Fifty slave women grind corn and weave. Outside is an orchard of pears, pomegranates, apples, figs, and olives, where fruit follows fruit the year round under the west wind, a vineyard, garden beds, and two springs, one for the garden and one running under the courtyard for the townspeople.
Odysseus walks in unseen, throws his arms around Arete's knees, and the mist lifts. The hall falls silent until Echeneus, the oldest Phaeacian, tells Alcinous the stranger should not be left sitting in the ashes. Odysseus is raised, seated on a silver-studded chair, given food, and a is poured to Zeus, protector of . Alcinous promises him passage home, says he half wonders whether this is a god, and later says that if the stranger would stay he would give him his daughter, a house, and possessions — but that no one will keep him against his will.
When the others have gone, Arete asks who he is and where he got those clothes, which she made herself. Odysseus tells of Ogygia, of Calypso keeping him seven years and offering to make him immortal, of the raft, the storm, the swim, and the river; he says he was given the clothes by Nausicaa, and says it was his own fault she did not bring him herself, to protect her. Alcinous says she should have escorted him; Odysseus answers that she did nothing wrong. He is given a bed under the portico.
Alcinous holds an assembly; fifty-two young men are chosen to crew the ship. At the feast the herald brings in Demodocus, whom the Muse loved and gave song while taking his sight. He sings of a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at a feast, which Agamemnon was glad to see. Odysseus draws his cloak over his head and weeps; Alcinous, sitting beside him, notices and calls for games.
In the contests Clytoneus wins the footrace, Euryalus the wrestling, Amphialus the jump, Elatreus the discus, and Laodamas the boxing. Laodamas invites the stranger to compete; when he declines, Euryalus says he looks like no athlete but like a captain of merchant sailors, mindful of cargo and profit. Odysseus replies that the gods do not give every man beauty, sense, and eloquence together, takes a discus larger and heavier than the ones in use, and throws it beyond all the marks; Athena, in the form of a man, marks the throw and says so. He then challenges any Phaeacian at boxing, wrestling, or archery, says only Philoctetes surpassed him with the bow at Troy, declines to compete with earlier men such as Heracles and Eurytus, and excuses himself from the footrace because the sea has worn down his legs.
Alcinous says the Phaeacians are not faultless boxers or wrestlers but are fast runners and the best of seamen, and that what they love is the feast, the lyre, dancing, changes of clothes, warm baths, and beds. Dancers perform, and Halius and Laodamas dance with a ball. Euryalus apologizes and gives Odysseus a bronze sword with a silver hilt and ivory scabbard; the twelve other lords each give a cloak, a tunic, and gold, and Alcinous adds a cup.
Demodocus sings of Ares and Aphrodite: Helios tells Hephaestus of the affair; Hephaestus forges chains like spider-web, fixes them round the bed, and says he is going to Lemnos; the lovers are caught fast; he calls the gods to witness and demands his bride-gifts back; the male gods come and laugh, the goddesses stay away; Apollo asks Hermes whether he would lie in such chains beside Aphrodite and Hermes says he would, under three times as many, with all the goddesses watching; Poseidon does not laugh but asks for the release and guarantees payment; Ares goes to Thrace, Aphrodite to Paphos, where the Graces bathe and anoint her. The poem records no reaction from Odysseus to this song.
Odysseus bathes, and Nausicaa, standing by the doorpost, tells him to remember her when he is home, since she saved his life; he says he will pray to her as to a god all his days. At the feast he sends a cut of pork to Demodocus, praises him, and asks for the song of the wooden horse. Demodocus sings it: the Argives burning their camp, the horse in the assembly place, the debate whether to split it open or push it off the rocks, and Odysseus and his men coming out to sack the city. Odysseus weeps, and the poet compares him to a woman who throws herself on her husband's body in a fallen city, and is beaten across the back and shoulders by spear-butts and led away to slavery. Alcinous stops the song and asks him his name, his country, and why he weeps at the fate of the Argives.
He gives his name: Odysseus, son of Laertes, known among men for his cunning, whose fame reaches heaven. He describes Ithaca and Mount Neriton, says Calypso and Circe both wanted to keep him, and that nothing is sweeter than one's own country. From here to the end of Book 12 he is the speaker.
From Troy the wind took them to Ismarus, city of the Cicones. They sacked it and shared out the plunder. Odysseus spared Maron, priest of Apollo, who gave him gold, a silver bowl, and twelve jars of unmixed wine so strong it was diluted with twenty parts water. The men would not leave, drank and slaughtered on the shore, and inland Cicones attacked at dawn: six benchmen from each ship were killed. A storm then drove them nine days past Cythera.
On the tenth they reached the Lotus-eaters, who offered the lotus to the scouts; those who ate it wanted only to stay, and Odysseus dragged them back weeping and tied them under the benches.
Next the land of the Cyclopes, who do not plant or plough, have no assemblies or laws, live in caves in the hills, and each rules his own wife and children without regard for the others; they have no ships or shipwrights. The fleet lands first on a wooded island opposite, untilled and full of goats, where they kill nine goats for each ship. Odysseus then takes one ship and twelve men to see what the neighbours are like, and whether they are wild or hospitable men who fear the gods, carrying a goatskin of Maron's wine.
The cave holds cheeses, pens of lambs and kids, and vessels of whey. The men urge him to take the cheeses and lambs and go; he refuses, wanting to see the owner and receive . Polyphemus returns with his flocks, blocks the entrance with a stone that twenty-two wagons could not move, and asks who they are. Odysseus says they are Agamemnon's men, asks for the gifts due to strangers, and names Zeus as protector of suppliants. Polyphemus says the Cyclopes care nothing for Zeus, seizes two men, dashes them on the ground, and eats them. Odysseus does not stab him as he sleeps, because no one else could move the stone.
Next evening, after four more men are eaten, Odysseus offers the wine. Polyphemus drinks three bowls, asks his name, and is told Nobody; his guest-gift, he says, is that Nobody will be eaten last. He falls asleep, and Odysseus and four chosen men drive a sharpened, fire-hardened olive stake — as big as the mast of a twenty-oared ship — into his eye. He screams; the other Cyclopes come to the cave and ask what is wrong; when he says Nobody is killing him by force or treachery, they tell him to pray to his father Poseidon, and leave.
In the morning the rams are lashed in threes with each man under the middle one, and Odysseus clings beneath the great ram, which Polyphemus stops and speaks to as it goes out last. From the ship Odysseus shouts back that Zeus has punished him; Polyphemus throws a hilltop that nearly drives them ashore. Odysseus then shouts his own name, his father's, and Ithaca. Polyphemus recalls that Telemus once prophesied he would be blinded by Odysseus, and prays to Poseidon that Odysseus never reach home, or if he must, that he come late and in a bad way, on a foreign ship, having lost all his companions, and find trouble in his house. He hurls another rock. They return to the goat island, divide the flocks, and Odysseus sacrifices the great ram to Zeus, who does not accept it.
Aeolus son of Hippotas lives on a floating island walled with bronze, with six sons married to his six daughters. He hosts them a month, then gives Odysseus an ox-hide bag containing the winds, tied with silver wire, and sends the west wind to blow them home. Odysseus steers nine days without sleeping; on the tenth, with Ithaca in sight and men tending the shore fires, he sleeps. The crew, saying he is bringing home gold and silver from Aeolus while they have nothing, open the bag. The storm carries them back to Aeolia, where Aeolus drives them out, saying no man hated by the gods may be helped.
Six days of rowing bring them to Telepylus in the land of the Laestrygonians. The harbour is enclosed by cliffs with a narrow mouth, and eleven ships moor inside; Odysseus ties his own outside. Scouts meet the daughter of Antiphates drawing water at the spring Artacie, and she leads them to the house; her mother is huge, and the king seizes one man to eat. The Laestrygonians gather along the cliffs, spear the men like fish, and smash the ships with boulders. Only Odysseus's ship escapes.
They reach Aeaea, island of Circe, sister of Aeetes and daughter of Helios and Perse. Odysseus kills a great stag and they eat. He divides the men into two parties, his own and Eurylochus's, and the lot falls on Eurylochus to go inland with twenty-two men. They find a stone house in a clearing with mountain wolves and lions around it, which fawn on them; Circe is inside singing at a great loom. Polites calls out and she opens the door. She gives them cheese, barley, honey, and Pramnian wine mixed with drugs, strikes them with her wand, and they become swine, with their minds unchanged; she pens them and throws them acorns and cornel berries. Eurylochus, who stayed outside suspecting a trap, returns and reports.
Odysseus goes alone. Hermes meets him in the form of a young man and gives him moly, black at the root with a milk-white flower, hard for mortals to dig; he tells him that when Circe strikes with the wand he must draw his sword and rush at her, and when she invites him to bed, to make her swear the great oath of the gods that she will do him no harm when he is disarmed. It happens as Hermes said. Circe swears, and afterwards Odysseus refuses to eat until his men are freed. She anoints the pigs and they become men again, younger, taller, and handsomer than before, and weep. Eurylochus objects to going to her house at all and Odysseus considers cutting off his head, but the crew restrain him.
They stay a year, eating and drinking. At the end of it the men tell Odysseus it is time to think of home. Circe agrees to release them, but says he must first go to the house of Hades and Persephone to consult the ghost of the blind Theban prophet Tiresias, whose mind Persephone left whole. Odysseus's heart breaks at this. She tells him to set the mast, let the north wind carry him across Ocean to the grove of Persephone, dig a pit, pour offerings of milk and honey, wine, and water with barley, and sacrifice a ram and a black ewe. As they leave, the youngest of the crew, Elpenor, who had slept on the roof for coolness, wakes at the noise, forgets the ladder, falls, and breaks his neck. They sail without burying him.
The anthology's headnote: apart from a handful of poems, such as "He is more than a hero," that ancient commentators quoted whole, only of Sappho survive. Some were preserved by classical writers; many were recovered in the nineteenth century from that had been used as stuffing for mummified Egyptian crocodiles, so a piece is often a single image lifted out of a longer poem. Barnard does not rebuild the Greek verse form or fill in what is missing — she aims at Sappho's plain, direct speech and leaves the fragment a fragment.
The poems themselves are on a companion page — a page to type each poem into, with a map of how it runs in the anthology and a note on what's underneath the translation.
Four stanzas, the first being the title line alone. The speaker tells her mother she cannot get on with her weaving, and says the blame lies with Aphrodite — gentle as the goddess is, desire for a boy has all but killed her. The whole poem is a household task abandoned and a cause assigned.
A small poem about her daughter. The speaker says she has a little girl named Cleis who resembles a golden flower, and that she would not give her up for the whole kingdom of Croesus, love thrown into the bargain. The anthology's footnote glosses Croesus as the Lydian king, reigning 560–546 B.C.E., proverbial for wealth.
Spoken to Cleis. The speaker has no embroidered headband from to give her, of the kind she herself once wore. She passes on what her own mother used to say: in that generation a purple ribbon looped in the hair was considered the height of style. But that was for dark-haired women, she adds — a girl whose hair is yellower than torchlight should wear nothing on her head but fresh flowers.
Two speakers, each with one image. The first voice likens the girl to a ripening on the topmost branch at the top of a tree, overlooked by the pickers — or not overlooked so much as out of reach. The second voice answers with a in the mountains, trampled underfoot by shepherds until nothing is left of it but a purple stain on the ground.
The speaker looks at a man who is allowed to sit facing the woman she loves, listening close to her voice and her laughter, and calls him godlike — more than a hero, a god in her eyes.
The rest of the poem is the physical effect of that laughter on the speaker herself, symptom by symptom: her heart pounds; meeting the woman suddenly she cannot speak, her tongue breaks; a thin flame runs under her skin; she sees nothing; her own ears drum; she sweats; she shakes all over; she turns paler than dry grass — and at such moments, she says, death is not far off.
A summons. The speaker asks the goddess to leave and come to the grove where they are waiting, by precincts sacred to her: incense burning on the altar, cold streams running through apple branches, a young thicket of roses shading the ground, sleep dropping from the quivering leaves, meadows where horses have grown sleek, spring flowers, and dill scenting the air.
The last stanza names her outright — Queen, — and asks her to fill their gold cups with nectar mixed with love. The footnote explains the : Aphrodite was conceived from the sea-foam of 's severed genitals off the coast of Cyprus.
The opening is blunt: no word has come, and the speaker says frankly that she wishes she were dead. She then recalls the departure itself. The woman wept a great deal and said that the parting had to be borne, that she was going unwillingly.
The rest is the speaker's reply, quoted back. She told her to go and be happy, but to remember whom she was leaving bound by love; and if she should forget, to think instead of what they had given Aphrodite and everything lovely they had shared — violet , braided rosebuds, and wound about her young neck, poured over her head, soft mats with girls lying beside everything they most wanted — and of how no chorus was ever sung without theirs and no woodland bloomed in spring without their song. The text breaks off there, mid-catalogue, on an ellipsis.