The Odyssey

Odysseus leaves his wife and baby son to fight at Troy, and ten years later he finally turns his twelve ships toward home. But a stop for fresh water goes wrong, and an island of forgetful strangers teaches him that the sea is not finished with him.

Trapped behind a boulder no man can move, with a one-eyed giant between them and the only door, Odysseus cannot fight his way out. He will have to think his way out instead, using a false name and a cup of unwatered wine.

The keeper of the winds hands Odysseus a leather bag that guarantees a safe voyage, and the coast of Ithaca comes up on the tenth morning. Then his exhausted crew decides the bag must be full of treasure he does not intend to share.

An enchantress in a forest house turns half the crew into pigs, and the only thing that can undo it is a plant no man can pull out of the ground. Getting home will cost Odysseus a journey no living person is supposed to make.

Every warning Odysseus has been given comes due at once: a song no sailor survives, a strait with a monster on one side and a whirlpool on the other, and one herd of cattle in all the world that his starving men must not touch.

After seven years held on a beautiful island by a goddess who will not let him leave, Odysseus is finally free to build a raft. Getting off the island turns out to be far easier than surviving the sea between it and home.

Odysseus reaches Ithaca after twenty years and cannot walk through his own front door, because more than a hundred men are inside eating his house down to nothing. So he goes in as an old beggar instead, to learn who is still loyal.

Penelope offers herself to whichever man can string her husband's great bow and shoot a single arrow through twelve axes standing in a row. Every one of them fails. Then the old beggar sitting by the door asks for a turn.