What Happens in Book 1

The Odyssey opens with an invocation: "Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course." Homer announces the subject of his poem — Odysseus — but then turns immediately to Olympus, where the gods are in council. Ten years have passed since the fall of Troy. Other Greek leaders have returned home; Odysseus has not. He is being held by the nymph Calypso on her remote island. Athena, his patron goddess, sees an opportunity: Poseidon, who hates Odysseus, is absent from the council, and she presses Zeus to allow her to act.

While the gods deliberate Odysseus's release, Athena descends to Ithaca, disguised as Mentes, an old guest-friend of the family. There she finds the palace in disarray. A crowd of suitors — young men of the island and surrounding islands — have taken up residence, eating Odysseus's livestock, drinking his wine, and pressing his wife Penelope to remarry. They behave as if Odysseus is dead, and as if his household is theirs to consume.

Athena meets Telemachus, Odysseus's son, now a young man. He has lived his whole life in his father's absence, and he has accepted the suitors' presence with a kind of resigned helplessness. Athena, in her disguise, challenges him. She tells him to call an assembly of the Ithacans, confront the suitors publicly, and then sail in search of news of his father. By the end of the book, Telemachus is speaking, for the first time, like the son of a king.

Characters Introduced in Book 1

  • Athena

    Goddess of wisdom, strategy, and crafts; daughter of Zeus and Odysseus's lifelong advocate. Throughout the poem she works as both protector and tactician, sometimes openly, more often in disguise. Book 1 establishes her as the engine of the plot: it is her decision to act, not Odysseus's, that begins the story's movement.

  • Telemachus

    Odysseus's only son, born just before his father left for Troy. Twenty years old at the poem's opening, he has grown up surrounded by men trying to displace his father. The first four books of the Odyssey are sometimes called the Telemachy because they belong to him, and his journey from passivity to action begins here.

A Line Worth Lingering On

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy."

The first thing Homer asks for is not strength, or courage, or even glory. He asks the Muse to sing of a man of twists and turns — polytropos in the Greek. From the first word, the poem signals what kind of hero we are about to follow: not the strongest, not the bravest, but the cleverest. The one who thinks his way home.

A Question to Read With

Homer begins not with the hero, but with the gods. What does that choice tell us about who, or what, is really in control of this story?

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