A song of Odysseus, and a place among older poems

The notes turn to Homer’s epic, the Odyssey, among Greek and Roman myth. The title, they write, means “Odysseus’s song.” They describe it as a joining of stories long passed down by word of mouth with what they take to be historical fact, and they chose it for the picture of a man who meets hardship after hardship and still lives on his own terms. They also write that it is the first work of literature humanity left behind, or the oldest among works that still survive — a claim that belongs to the notes, not a fact set down here as settled.

The poem, they say, has 12,110 lines. From geographical knowledge, the daily life described in the verse, and other inner evidence, they guess it came a little later than the Iliad, a work they say is similarly well known. Some people, they add, think the Iliad and the Odyssey were only written down from many mouths, and that a man named Homer may never have lived. Whether he did or not, they still give him a large place in the history of European letters, because later writers began under his influence and many works of art still travel under that name.

Ten years at sea, and a story built around forty days

The adventure, they write, is one of the best-known stories in Greek myth. After the Greek army takes Troy, Odysseus wanders at sea for ten years before he comes home. The poem is built around events in a span of forty days. He angers Poseidon and meets storms. He escapes the threat of one-eyed Polyphemus by cunning. Before the Sirens’ song he has his men stop their ears and has himself bound to the mast, a scene they read as a frank show of temperament. On the witch Circe’s island the crew are turned into pigs and then released, but Odysseus stays a further year, and in that time, they write, he loses all his men.

When he reaches Ithaca, Athena helps him go disguised as a beggar, confirm his wife’s love, and drive the suitors off with a bow, so that he and Penelope are reunited. The first four books, they say, show the suitors wasting the household while Odysseus is away, and young Telemachus unable to stop them. Athena takes the form of Mentor and sends the boy to Nestor and Menelaus for news of his father. In book 5 Odysseus appears held by Calypso, leaves the island at the gods’ command, and meets a storm. Books 13 through 24 are the return and the punishment; after the couple meet again, a goddess helps them make peace also with the suitors’ blood relations.

A broken order set right

The writer reads the work, through the whole of the narrative, as a story in which a disordered world is set in order again. Narrowly, they say, it is the story of a person who grows through trial; more broadly, it is a search, after a war, for a new order. Odysseus’s revenge, in that reading, stands for a renewal of the world’s order and a return to an agricultural life. The notes leave the subject there, before a later table of ways to read the poem. The same Korean report, in a longer form, sits on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on Homer’s Odyssey: its length, frame, plot, and a reading of restored order.

Last updated 15 November 2026