What actually happens in Homer’s Odyssey? Not what most people remember. The poem opens in year twenty, with Odysseus weeping on a goddess’s island and his house overrun by more than a hundred suitors. The famous monsters – the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla – take up just four of its twenty-four books, and they’re told by Odysseus himself, at a dinner party. This episode follows the whole story in order: the gods’ council, Telemachus’s search, the raft and the storm, Nausicaa, the Cyclops and the curse that shapes everything, the bag of winds opened in sight of home, the loss of every ship, and then the half most people never hear – the beggar in his own hall, Argos the dog, the scar, the bow, the olive-tree bed, and a prophecy that he must wander again. Along the way: the poem’s own answer to why it took him ten years.
0:00 A man who can’t go home
0:35 Four of twenty-four books
0:56 Why ten years?
1:11 The gods decide
1:51 Penelope’s web
2:27 Telemachus goes looking
3:03 The raft and the storm
3:33 Nausicaa
3:54 The song of the wooden horse
4:17 “I am Odysseus”
4:30 Twelve ships
4:50 The Cyclops
5:23 The curse
5:51 The bag of winds
6:17 Eleven ships lost
6:29 Circe
6:47 The land of the dead
7:09 The Sirens and Scylla
7:28 The cattle of the sun
7:56 Answer one: why ten years
8:32 The liar comes home
9:04 Father and son
9:25 Argos
9:55 The scar
10:22 The bow
10:46 The suitors and the maids
11:06 The bed
11:31 Laertes and the peace
11:48 The oar
12:14 Answer two
12:42 The curse fulfilled
12:57 What survived
Sources: Homer, Odyssey, trans. S. H. Butcher & A. Lang (1879, public domain) – every quotation on screen and in the narration; Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Odyssey’; Wikipedia, ‘Odyssey’, ‘Trojan Horse’, ‘Eleusis Amphora’; Ancient World Magazine, ‘The blinding of Polyphemus’.
Image credits: the Eleusis Amphora, c. 660 BC, Archaeological Museum of Eleusis. Photo: Sarah C. Murray, CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/), via Wikimedia Commons. All other images are original illustrations and diagrams made for this channel.
#Odyssey #Homer #GreekMythology
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