Chapter summary
The poem asks the Muse to tell of the man of many turns, who wandered much after sacking Troy, came to know the cities and customs of many peoples, and suffered at sea to save his own life and the return of his companions. He did not manage to save them: they died through their own recklessness, because they ate the cattle of the Sun. When the story begins, all the survivors of the war have already come home, except Odysseus, held on an island by the nymph Calypso, who wants him as her husband. The year has come in which the gods decided his return to Ithaca, and all of them take pity on him, except Poseidon, who is far away, at a feast among the Ethiopians.
The other gods are gathered in the palace of Zeus, and Zeus speaks first, recalling Aegisthus, killed by Orestes: mortals blame the gods for their troubles, but they suffer beyond their share through their own recklessness, like Aegisthus, who killed Agamemnon and took his wife, even after being warned by Hermes. Athena agrees that Aegisthus deserved it and changes the subject: she grieves for Odysseus, held on Calypso's island, longing to see at least the smoke of his own land, and asks Zeus why he has forgotten him. Zeus explains that it is Poseidon who pursues Odysseus, because he blinded the god's son, the Cyclops Polyphemus; Poseidon does not kill him, but makes him wander far from his homeland. The return is decided. Athena proposes sending Hermes to Calypso and going herself to Ithaca to give courage to Odysseus's son, to have him call the assembly against the suitors and send him to Pylos and Sparta in search of news of his father.
Athena arrives at the door of Odysseus's house disguised as Mentes, chief of the Taphians and an old guest of the family. She finds the suitors playing dice, seated on the hides of the oxen they themselves have slaughtered, while the servants prepare the feast. Telemachus is seated among them, sad, imagining his father arriving to drive them out. He is the first to see the stranger, is indignant that a guest should have waited so long at the door, welcomes him, places his spear beside the spears of Odysseus, and seats him apart from the suitors, so the noise will not bother him and so he can ask about his father. After the feast, the bard Phemius sings to the suitors, and Telemachus confides in a low voice: those men eat without paying the upkeep of a man whose bones may be rotting in the rain.
Mentes says who he is, says that Odysseus is alive, held by savage men on an island, and that he will soon return, because he is a man of many resources. He asks whether the boy is truly the son of Odysseus, so alike is he. Telemachus answers that his mother says so, but that no one knows his own origin for certain, and he laments that his father has vanished without glory, carried off by the harpies, without a tomb to honor his son. He tells that the nobles of Ithaca and the neighboring islands court Penelope, that she neither refuses the marriage nor decides it, and that they consume the house. The goddess is indignant and gives her advice: call the assembly the next day, send the suitors away, send his mother back to her father if she wishes to marry, sail in a ship with twenty oarsmen to Pylos, to speak with Nestor, and to Sparta, to speak with Menelaus, and, if he learns that his father is dead, raise a tomb for him, give his mother in marriage, and think about how to kill the suitors, by cunning or in the open, because he is no longer of an age for childish things. She recalls Orestes, who won fame by avenging his father. She leaves the guest gift Telemachus offers for her return and flies off like a bird, and the boy realizes he has spoken with a god.
Phemius sings of the painful return of the Achaeans from Troy. Penelope hears it from her room, comes down, and asks him, weeping, to sing something else, because the song reminds her of her husband. Telemachus contradicts her: bards are not to blame, Zeus gives each person his lot, and Odysseus was not the only one to lose his return; he tells his mother to go back to the loom and the distaff, because speech is a matter for men, above all for him, who holds power in the house. Penelope is astonished and obeys, goes up and weeps for her husband until Athena gives her sleep. Telemachus announces to the suitors the assembly for the next day, threatens them with the vengeance of the gods, confronts Antinous, who mocks him, and answers Eurymachus, who asks about the stranger: he says it was Mentes, knowing in his heart that it was a goddess. At night, the old nurse Eurycleia escorts him to his room with torches, and he spends the night awake, wrapped in wool, thinking of the journey Athena pointed out to him.
Analysis
The hero of the poem does not appear in the first book. Odysseus exists here as an absence: in Athena's complaint, in the bones Telemachus imagines in the rain, in the song of Phemius that makes Penelope weep. The poem chooses to begin with a house without a master, and it is this that gives weight to the return: what is at stake is not only a man coming home, but a house, a woman, and a son coming undone in the waiting.
Zeus opens the poem by saying that men suffer beyond their share through their own recklessness, and the proem has already said the same thing about Odysseus's companions. The Odyssey begins with a moral rule that the Iliad does not have: whoever suffers may bear some blame for his own suffering. It is by this measure that the poem will judge the suitors.
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