Hospitality, the law that measures peoples
The poem measures each people by a question that Odysseus repeats on arriving in unknown lands: are they arrogant, savage and lawless, or hospitable, with minds that fear the gods? He asks it before the Phaeacians in Book VI, at the door of the Cyclopes in Book IX, and on waking in Ithaca in Book XIII. The rule behind it is that every stranger and every beggar comes from Zeus, and that the suppliant must be received.
The rite is known to all. Peisistratus welcomes guests before asking who they are, and Nestor is offended at the idea of Odysseus's son sleeping on the deck (Book III), Menelaus has them eat first (Book IV), and Eumaeus receives the beggar out of fear of Zeus, without demanding that he be believed (Book XIV). The guest may ask for an escort to his homeland, as Odysseus asks Alcinous (Book VII), and receives gifts (Book VIII). The Cyclops reverses everything and devours the guests (Book IX), and the suitors break the rule every day by eating without paying for another's sustenance (Book I), even to the ox hoof that Ctesippus throws at the beggar as a guest's gift (Book XX).
The gods and the punishment of the return
The poem begins on Olympus. In the council of Book I, Zeus recalls Aegisthus and says that mortals blame the gods for their evils, when they suffer beyond their share through their own folly, and Athena asks why their father has forgotten Odysseus. The answer is that Poseidon pursues him for having blinded his son Polyphemus: the punishment is not death, it is wandering far from the homeland, and the return is only decided because Poseidon is away, at a feast among the Ethiopians. Athena is the protector of Odysseus and Telemachus and appears in other guises, such as Mentes, Mentor, a shepherd and a swallow, and pours out grace, sleep and mist. The gods, says one of the suitors in Book XVII, roam the cities in the form of strangers, observing the excess and the good order of men.
The returns of the other heroes
When the story begins, all the survivors of Troy have already come home, except Odysseus, and the other returns are told within the poem as mirrors of his. Nestor tells in Book III that Zeus planned a painful return because not all the Achaeans were sensible or just, and that Agamemnon was killed at home by Aegisthus and avenged by Orestes. In Book IV, Menelaus says he gathered wealth over eight years of wandering through Egypt and other lands while his brother was being killed, and Proteus tells of the end of Ajax and of Agamemnon. In Book XI, Agamemnon himself, in Hades, advises Odysseus not to be gentle with his wife and makes an exception for Penelope.
The house in Ithaca and who occupies it
Ithaca is a harsh island, good for raising young men, with no wide tracks nor meadows for horses (Book IX, Book IV). The line of Odysseus's house is reduced to one son in each generation, Arcesius, Laertes, Odysseus and Telemachus, and that is why the enemies are many (Book XVI). The suitors come from Dulichium, Same, Zacynthus and Ithaca itself, more than a hundred with the servants, and they consume oxen, sheep and wine without paying (Book XVI). Penelope neither refuses nor decides the marriage: she gains three years with Laertes's loom (Book II), she is pressed by her parents and by her son (Book XIX), and Eurymachus's bride-price increases (Book XV). The house is not public, Telemachus says: it belongs to Odysseus, who acquired it for his son (Book XX).
How the poem tells it
The poem does not follow the order of events. It begins with the house without a master and with the son (Book I), and Odysseus only enters the scene in Book V. From Book IX to Book XII it is he himself who narrates the adventures of the return to the Phaeacians, and accuses himself within his own story; from Book XIII onward it is told again in the third person, now in Ithaca. Within the poem there are other singers: the blind Demodocus, among the Phaeacians, who sings of the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles, the net of Hephaestus and the wooden horse (Book VIII), and Phemius, in Ithaca, whose song of the return of the Achaeans makes Penelope weep (Book I). Dreams have two gates, of horn and of ivory, and Penelope says that those that pass through the ivory deceive (Book XIX).