Thirty chapters have gone by. It began at a place on Ithaca empty for twenty years and ended in peace, and in between came the sea and monsters and gods and people.
This epic is not one man’s tale of adventure. It is a story made together by those who waited, endured and recognized. This last chapter tells no new story.
It threads the thirty chapters back together in the order of the six parts. So that what you have read lies in one line rather than scattered.
Waiting: A House Without Its Father
The four chapters of part one begin without Odysseus. Ithaca was an empty house filled by suitors, and Telemachus boarded a ship for the first time to look for his father.
The counsel given under the name of Mentor was not an answer but an opened door. At Pylos and Sparta he saw another house as a mirror of his own. The drug of Helen was the first of the things that make you forget in this epic.
The Sea: A Man Held
In part two Odysseus is alone, held by the sea. Calypso offered him a life without end and he chose a house that ends. In front of the storm cunning did not work and there was only holding on.
Nausicaa was the only one who did not run away. And in chapter 8, hearing his own story sung, he wept. Those tears opened the door to ten books of remembering.
The Adventures: The Things That Make You Forget Home
The nine books of part three run on as recollection. The lotus made him forget home itself, and before the Cyclops he hid his name.
The winds in the bag were let out by a single suspicion. The Laestrygonians took eleven ships away.
Before Circe he accepted help from another for the first time. In the land of the dead Achilles said being alive is better than glory. The Sirens held people not by endurance but by the promise of knowing.
Before Scylla he chose a loss knowing it was coming. The cattle of the sun took the whole crew as the price of a broken warning. Alone at last, he came that way to the island of Calypso.
Homecoming: Disguise and Patience
In part four he reaches Ithaca after twenty years. But arriving was not the end. Disguised as a beggar he began again from the lowest place.
The hut of Eumaeus kept truer hospitality than the palace. The reunion with Telemachus brought doubt before joy. And in his own house he was struck with a stool and bore it.
Recognition: Who, and by What
Part five asks one question four times. An old dog knew him by love and died. The nurse knew him by a scar under her fingertips.
Penelope kept herself by a cunning repeated every night for three years. The bow proved him by strength the body remembered. And the last making sure was always the wife’s own share.
Today, the End Is Not Revenge but Stopping
In the last part he takes back his house and judges. But he treated the one who did wrong and the one who was made to do it apart. Before his father Laertes only the list of trees would serve as proof.
When the families of the suitors came for revenge, the story did not close in victory. The bolt of Zeus and the order of Athena stopped the fight. The house of Agamemnon, already told in chapter 3, carried revenge down the generations.
On Ithaca that chain is cut by the hand of a god. Odysseus knew how to win and did not know how to stop. So the story stops him in his place, and ends.
Going home is what the name of this epic is worth. But the real ending lay in the stopping, not the arriving. The man who endured longest had, at the last, to learn enduring again.
This Is Not the End
The six parts are threaded, and the series does not close here.
Next come five chapters of the Nostoi. Nostoi is a word meaning homecomings.
Odysseus was not the only one who left Troy. On the same sea others were making their way to their own homes.
There is a man struck by lightning, a man adrift for ten years, a man caught by a vow. There is a man who got back and found it was not home.
And there is one man who arrived without trouble. Thirty five chapters in all.