History Literature / TheOdyssey

Like many fathers would be, Poseidon is slightly tiffed that his son, who only had one eye to begin with, is now blind, so he seeks revenge on Odysseus. First, Odysseus ends up with the witch Circe, who turns his crew into pigs ([[IGotBetter they get better]]), then he goes to Hades and [[DeadPersonConversation chats with a few people]], including [[BlindSeer Tiresias]]--who tells him that even after he gets home, he won't be able to stay forever. After avoiding the Sirens and Scylla & Charybdis, the crew then kill all the Cattle of the Sun, who belong to Helios, [[TooDumbToLive despite being warned not to]]. [[RocksFallEveryoneDies Lightning falls, the crew dies]], and Odysseus is shipwrecked on Calypso's island. She makes him her manwhore for seven years and Odysseus cries on some more rocks. This takes us up to the present, or at least, the first chapter.

* DoubleStandard: Odysseus screws a number of women. Penelope waits twenty years for a husband that she believes to be dead and never cracks once. of course, this was perfectly acceptable for a Greek man at the time.
** Though there were only two women he had sex with, and neither cases were very consensual. And indeed one could argue that it was even more amazing that Odysseus would return to his wife (now 20 years older than when he left her), passing up a chance of eternal bliss with either Circe or Calypso.
** Calypso herself sees a different kind of double standard at work. When Hermes tells her Zeus has ordered her to release Odysseus, she complains that the gods never allow goddesses to enjoy relationships with mortals, citing the examples of Orion and Iasion, lovers of Eos and Demeter respectively, who were killed by gods, yet gods screw around with mortal women all the time.
*** Olympians having a DoubleStandard is unsurprising. Greek gods had a surprisingly undivine habit of being more erratic, tyrannical, dishonorable, or just plain childish than even most mortals. Socrates noticed that and he wasn't the only one.

* BrainsEvilBrawnGood: [[AlternateCharacterIntepretation According to different sources,]] Odysseus' cleverness and wiliness were what set him among the greats of the Greek heroes, or else they were signs of a weak and cowardly nature too pathetic to fight like a real man.

*** Olympians having a DoubleStandard is unsurprising. Greek gods had a surprisingly undivine habit of being more erratic, tyrannical, dishonorable, or just plain childish than even most mortals. Socrates noticed that and he wasn't the only one.
**** RapeIsOkWhenItIsFemaleOnMale: Depending on your translation, Calypso and Odysseus.

* FridgeBrilliance: Odysseus has been away from Ithaca for twenty years, and Telemachos is just beginning to take control of his family in the last six months or so. So who's been ruling Ithaca? That's right, Penelope.

* UnreliableNarrator: Odysseus is hinted to be one of these, talking about stuff that he couldn't possibly know.

First, they end up on an island full of [[LotusEaterMachine Lotus-Eaters]], who entrance the crew and give them [[MushroomSamba a good time,]] so they forget they want to go home. Odysseus drags them back to the ship, and they carry on, only to end up at the island of the Cyclops. Once again, the crew (along with Odysseus) show their wit by eating the food before the Cyclops, Polyphemus, shows up. He is a bit angry, demonstrated by the fact that he bit off the heads of two of the crew. Odysseus tells Polyphemus that his name is "Nobody," then [[EyeScream blinds ol' Poly with an sharpened olive branch]], so that when Polyphemus reacts, he can only say, "Nobody did this!" Of course, Odysseus is an idiot, and gloats, saying, "Cyclops, if anyone ever asks you how you came by your blindness, tell him your eye was put out by Odysseus, sacker of cities, the son of Laertes, who lives in Ithaca" (9.506). Had the Greeks had social security numbers, he would have thrown that in too.

* DobuleStandardRapeFemaleOnMale/[[DoubleStandardRapeDivineOnMortal Divine On Mortal]]: Depending on your translation, Calypso and Odysseus.

* RapeIsOkIfItsFemaleOnMale/[[RapeIsOkayIfItsDivineOnMortal Divine On Mortal]]: Depending on your translation, Calypso and Odysseus.

''Literature/TheOdyssey'' (Greek: ''Ὀδύσσεια'') is one the epics of TheTrojanCycle and one of the [[OlderThanFeudalism oldest recorded stories]]. The original was reputedly composed by the blind poet {{Homer}} and transmitted orally until it was (according to tradition) written down and standardised at the behest of the tyrant Peisistratus in about 550 BCE.

The poem opens with the gods debating about Odysseus and his son, Telemachus. Odysseus left his infant son and wife, Penelope, for TheTrojanWar, but after the Fall of Troy he and his crew ended up stranded, and Odysseus had been away from home now for twenty years. Athena, who (unlike in ''Literature/TheIliad'') is the only god playing a large role in the story, heads down to Ithaca to tell the now-20-year-old Telemachus that it's time to man up and find out about his father. See, about three years before this [[OneHundredAndEight 108]] suitors showed up for Penelope and began trying to seduce her, and Telemachus was too much of a wimp to do anything. Penelope had managed to keep them at bay using a clever trick - she told them she would marry after she finished weaving a burial shroud for her father-in-law, but always undid the day's work at night. This kept them fooled for a while, but the plot is eventually discovered. So Telemachus goes and chats with several characters who survived the Trojan War--Menelaus and Nestor--who tell him about his dad and how [[BadassNormal badass]] he is. Unfortunately he neglected to inform Penelope of his departure, and now the suitors are out to murder him too.

** Finally, a real feast of tropes popular in Italy: in one of the lost epics of TheTrojanCycle, the ''Telegony'', Odysseus fathers a son, [[HeroicBastard Telegonos]], with Circe. When Telegonos comes of age he goes out to seek his father, but when he arrives on Ithaca the two get into a fight without recognizing each other and he unintentionally [[SelfMadeOrphan kills Odysseus]]. When the truth emerges, Circe brings him, Telemachos and Penelope to her island of Aiaia, grants the latter two immortality. In the end, Circe marries Telemachos and [[ComfortingTheWidow Penelope marries]] [[OedipusComplex Telegonos]], which results in a TangledFamilyTree. The story was also dramatized by Sophocles in the lost tragedy ''Odysseus Akanthoplex'', with the added detail that an oracle foretells that Odysseus will be killed by his own son, so he banishes Telemachos to another island...[[YouCantFightFate but of course the oracle wasn't referring to him]].

* TrojanHorse: Given a mention in the ''Odyssey'', but despite common perceptions [[SadlyMythtaken never shows up personally in Homer's works]]. The [[TheTrojanCycle epics]] they did appear in have been lost.

After this long {{flashback}}, about a third of the story, Odysseus finally gets home and finds the suitors still abusing hospitality (a capital sin in Ancient Greece) and trying to woo his wife. Odysseus reveals himself to his son, who has recently returned, and they begin to plot. The next day, Odysseus reveals himself to the suitors and kills them, kills the twelve housemaids who slept with them (but, of course, only after making the girls clean up the dead bodies), and then, finally, reveals himself to his wife. In typical Homeric fashion, this takes seventy-five pages. Odysseus tells Penelope that he'll have to leave eventually again, given what Tiresias prophesized, but in the meantime, he's home.

* TheThreeFacesOfAdam: Telemachos (Hunter), Odysseus (Lord), and Laertes (Prophet).

* UndersideRide

* HoYay: Eurylochus to Odysseus: "You're a hard man, Odysseus. Your fighting spirit's stronger than ours; your stamina never fails. You must be made of iron head to foot." Also, Telemachus and everyone.

* EverythingsBetterOnDrugs: The Lotus Eaters, who eat nothing but a fruit that causes them [[LotusEaterMachine a sort of never-ending]] [[TropeMaker lethargic]] [[TropeNamer contentment]].

* TellMeAboutMyFather

''Literature/TheOdyssey'' (Greek: ''Ὀδύσσεια'') is one the epics of TheTrojanCycle and one of the oldest recorded stories. The original was reputedly composed by the blind poet {{Homer}} [[OlderThanDirt well before 600BC]] and transmitted orally until it was (according to tradition) written down and standardised at the behest of the tyrant Peisistratus in about 550 BC.

* IWillWaitForYou: Penelope and his dog, although unusual for the trope he does come back, making the trope OlderThanDirt.

* [[WhosOnFirst Who's On First?]]: Possibly the [[OlderThanDirt oldest example in the book]]. Odysseus told Polyphemus his name was "Nobody" (''μη τις''). When the Cyclops started screaming that he had been blinded, his brothers asked who had done this foul deed. The Cyclops replied that "Nobody has blinded me", so his brothers told him to shut up with the screaming over things that hadn't happened.

* DoubleStandard: Odysseus screws a number of women. Penelope waits twenty years for a husband that she believes to be dead and never cracks once.

* ((Jerkass)): The suitors, ''especially'' Antinous.

* OldRetainer: the swine-herder and Penelope's old nurse

* HoYay: Eurylochus to Odysseus: "You're a hard man, Odysseus. Your fighting spirit's stronger than ours; your stamina never fails. You must be made of iron head to foot." Also Telemachus and everyone.

* HoYay: Eurymachus to Odysseus: "You're a hard man, Odysseus. Your fighting spirit's stronger than ours; your stamina never fails. You must be made of iron head to foot." Also Telemachus and everyone.

** Calypso herself sees a different kind of double standard at work. When Hermes tells her Zeus has ordered her to release Odysseus, she complains that the gods never allow goddesses to enjoy relationships with mortals, citing the examples of Orion and Iasion, lovers of Eos and Demeter respectively, who were killed by gods.

* GeniusBonus: Read almost any English translation and you're getting, at best, half the story. There's a metric ton of information concealed in the original Greek that you'll be lucky to get from a good translator.
** Example: Menelaus is known as the "red-haired king". Why? Because he's referred to as "Menelaus Xanthus", which means, literally, "Menelaus the Blond". Scholars have changed his hair to red because they couldn't conceive of a blond Greek. But "xanthus" also means both "foreigner" and "slave". [[FridgeBrilliance There is clearly]] a hell of a lot more going on here than just his hair color.
** Helen and her sister Klytemnestra were both fathered by Zeus when he [[RapeIsOkayIfItsDivineOnMortal turned himself into a swan and raped Leda]]. In the Odyssey and the Iliad, Menelaus and Agamemnon are referred to with eagle symbolism. In Greek mythology, eagles and swans are at odds.
** When Penelope describes her dreams to [[BlatantLies an old, homeless stranger who is CLEARLY not her husband returned from the wars]], he says that some dreams come through a gate of horn and others through a gate of ivory. Dreams from the gate of horn are true, from the gate of ivory false. This is [[JustForPun an ancient Greek pun]]. In ancient Greek, "horn" is similar to the word "fulfill" and "ivory" to the word "deceive".
** This epic is quite literally filled with other examples of puns and archaic references that you'd have to be a scholar to understand, unless your copy of the poem happens to be very heavily footnoted.

** Then maybe she deserves more admiration than Odysseus.
** Of course, two of the encounters Odysseus has aren't exactly consensual.
*** And at least according to the Odyssey these were the only two women he had sex with. And indeed one could argue that it was even more amazing that Odysseus would return to his wife (now 20 years older than when he left her) passing up a chance of eternal bliss with either Circe or Calypso.