Chronology Odyssey

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Athena (who is Odysseus’s protector) Telemachus, Odysseus’s son Odysseus's enemy, the sea-god Poseidon Athena (now disguised as Telemachus’s friend Mentor Nestor, most venerable of the Greek warriors at Troy Nestor is now at home in Pylos. Menelaus’ brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Greeks at Troy, murdered on his return home by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. 8. Calypso is persuaded by the messenger god Hermes to release Odysseus. 9. The men visited the lazy Lotus-Eaters 10. The men were captured by the Cyclops Polyphemus, escaping by blinding him with a wooden stake. 11. They stayed with Aeolus the master of the winds 12. He gave Odysseus a leather bag containing all the winds, a gift that should have ensured a safe return home, had not the sailors foolishly opened the bag while Odysseus slept 13. All the winds flew out and the resulting storm drove the ships back the way they had come. 14. They re-embarked and encountered the cannibal Laestrygones. 15. Odysseus’s own ship was the only one to escape 16. He sailed on and visited the witch-goddess Circe, whose magic potions turned most of his sailors into swine. 17. Hermes met with Odysseus and gave him a drug called moly, an antidote to Circe’s potion. 18. They stayed on Circe’s island for a year. 19. They crossed the Ocean and reached a harbor at the western edge of the world, where Odysseus sacrificed to the dead and summoned the spirit of the old prophet Tiresias to advise him. 20. They skirted the land of the Sirens, 21. Approaching sailors were drawn to them by their enchanting singing, causing them to sail on the cliffs and drown 22. Odysseus escaped the Sirens by having all his sailors plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast. 23. They passed between the many-headed monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. 24. They landed on the island of Thrinacia. There Odysseus’ men – ignoring the warnings of Tiresias and Circe – hunted down the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios. 25. This sacrilege was punished by a shipwreck in which all but Odysseus himself were drowned. 26. He was washed ashore on the island of Calypso, where she kept him as her lover, and he had only now escaped. 27. the Phaeacians, who are skilled mariners, agree to help Odysseus on his way home.

28. They deliver him at night, while he is fast asleep, to a hidden harbor on Ithaca. He finds his way to the hut of one of his own former slaves, the swineherd Eumaeus. 29. Odysseus now plays the part of a wandering beggar in order to learn how things stand in his household. 30. Telemachus disembarks on the coast of Ithaca and makes for Eumaeus’s hut. Father and son meet. 31. Odysseus identifies himself to Telemachus (but still not to Eumaeus) and they determine that the suitors must be killed. 32. Accompanied by Eumaeus, Odysseus now returns to his own house, still disguised as a beggar. 33. He experiences the suitors’ rowdy behavior and plans their death 34. He meets Penelope: he tests her intentions with an invented story of his birth in Crete, where, he says, he once met Odysseus. Closely questioned, he adds that he had recently been in Thesprotia and had learned something there of Odysseus’s recent wanderings. 35. Odysseus’s identity is discovered by the housekeeper, Eurycleia, when he undresses for a bath and reveals an old thigh wound; he swears her to secrecy. 36. Next day, at Athena’s prompting, Penelope maneuvers the suitors into competing for her hand with an archery competition using Odysseus’s bow. 37. He takes part in the competition himself; he alone is strong enough to string the bow and therefore wins. Immediately he turns his arrows on the suitors, and all are killed. 38. Odysseus and Telemachus kill (by hanging) twelve of their household maids, who had slept with the suitors; they mutilate and kill the goatherd Melanthius, who had favored them. 39. Now at last Odysseus identifies himself to Penelope. She is hesitant, but accepts him when he correctly describes to her the bed he built for her when they married. 40. Next day he and Telemachus visit the country farm of his old father Laertes, who likewise accepts his identity only when Odysseus correctly describes the orchard that Laertes once gave him. 41.