The Odyssey

Ten years home from Troy

Odysseus leaves the ruins of Troy with twelve ships and reaches Ithaca ten years later alone, asleep on a stranger’s ship, to find 108 suitors eating his house bare. This timeline follows him landfall by landfall, drawn as a route across the Mediterranean, and then through the forty-odd days on which the poem itself is set.

Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. — Odyssey 1.1–2, translated by A. T. Murray (1919)

Story order, not telling order

The poem does not start at the beginning. It opens in the tenth year with Telemachus (Books 1–4), finds Odysseus on Calypso’s island (Book 5), brings him to the Phaeacians (6–8), and only there lets him tell the wanderings in flashback (9–12) before the return to Ithaca (13–24). Here the events stand in the order they happen. Every note gives its Book, and every citation to Murray’s translation the lines, so you can still follow the telling.

How the dates work

• The anchor is a convention. Troy falls in 1184 BCE, the date of the Alexandrian scholar Eratosthenes; the ancient estimates run from 1135 to 1333 BCE. The day, about 16 June, is Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s. Dates are BCE in the proleptic Julian calendar.

• The spans are the poem’s. A month with Aeolus, a year with Circe, a month stranded on Thrinacia, seven years with Calypso and part of an eighth, twenty days from her island to the Phaeacians, and the homecoming “in the twentieth year” after he left for the war.

• The placing is ours. The poem’s stated spans add up to a little over eight years, not ten, and it never says where the rest went. Here the wanderings run from Troy’s fall by the poem’s own counts (two days ashore after Ismarus, nine days to the Lotus-eaters, nine more to sight Ithaca, six to the Laestrygonians), the summer after the Cyclops, which the poem leaves unmeasured, takes up the slack, and Calypso’s eighth year runs to its end, so the story closes in 1174 BCE. Every day before the poem’s own is ours and reads c., for circa.

• The poem counts its days. From Athena’s visit in Book 1 to the peace in Book 24 is forty-one days, and every item from Book 1 on carries its day: Day 1 to Day 41. The poem names no month, so the days sit at the start of 1174 BCE only because a year starts there; any calendar date under them is a placeholder.

• An eclipse, perhaps. A line in Book 20 has been read as a solar eclipse, and one was total over the Ionian Islands on 16 April 1178 BCE. That is a hypothesis; see the Book 20 item.

Where it happened

Past Cape Malea the map is guesswork, and it always was. Ancient readers put the Lotus-eaters on Djerba, Aeolus on Lipari and Circe on Monte Circeo; Eratosthenes scoffed that “you will find the scene of the wanderings of Odysseus when you find the cobbler who sewed up the bag of the winds” (Strabo, Geography 1.2.15). Each place here is the classic identification, with a wide circle; the notes name the rivals.

Filter by flashback for what is told rather than shown, telemachy for Telemachus’s journey, monsters, gods, suitors, or losses to count the crew away to none. The Greek text and Murray’s translation are free on the Perseus Digital Library.