odyssey

The war at Troy was over. The great walls had fallen, the fires had burned down, and the Greek kings were loading their ships to sail home to their wives and their harvests. Among them stood Odysseus, king of little rocky Ithaca, who wanted nothing in the world so much as his own hearth and his own bed. He should have been home within the month.

But the sea had other plans, and so did the gods. A storm scattered his fleet. He put in at the wrong islands and woke the wrong monsters. He blinded a Cyclops who happened to be a son of the sea-god Poseidon, and from that day the ocean itself seemed to hold a grudge against him.

Ten long years he wandered. He was trapped in the cave of a one-eyed giant and slipped out clinging to the belly of a ram. He heard the Sirens sing and lived, because he had lashed himself to the mast. He sailed between a snatching monster and a devouring whirlpool, and lost good men to both. He was held captive on an enchanted island by a goddess who loved him, and still he wept on the shore, facing the water, longing for home.

When at last he came again to Ithaca, alone, in rags, no one knew him. He had to win back his own house by cunning and by the string of a bow no other man could bend. His journey had become the longest way home ever told.

Homer set it all down in a poem, and named that poem after the man: the Odyssey. So the word came to us not for the war he fought, but for the enormous, winding, danger-strewn voyage he took to get back. That is why any long journey full of trials and turnings-back is called an odyssey today.