The old poet began his song like this. “Tell me of that man, the man of many turns who spent ten years on the road.”
Ten years had passed since Troy fell, and the surviving kings had long since gone home. Only one of them had not come back.
It was Odysseus. The man who thought up the wooden horse could not reach his own house (Greek Myths, chapter 39).
The Council of the Gods
He had not died. He was held at the edge of the world on Ogygia, where the nymph Calypso had kept him for seven years.
Poseidon, god of the sea, was holding a grudge against him, and so the whole wide sea had become his prison. He tells that story himself later on (chapter 10).
While Poseidon was away the gods gathered, and Athena stood before Zeus and spoke. “He has paid as much as anyone could pay. It is time to send him home.”
The Guests Eating It All
At that same hour the palace on Ithaca was one long feast. More than a hundred suitors had settled in, killing the livestock of an absent master and emptying the wine store.
What they were after was the queen and the throne. Antinous, their leader, laughed loudest of all as he said it. “Odysseus is dead. Choose one of us now.”
As long as she refused they meant to eat through the estate, and there was nobody to stop them. The son was still young, and the old father had withdrawn to the country.
The Woman Who Waited Twenty Years
Queen Penelope wept every night. There was no proof her husband was dead and no word that he was alive.
Still she chose nobody, putting them off and soothing them and buying time. She had a fight of her own (chapter 24).
Waiting was not sitting still. It was holding a house together for twenty years so that it would not fall. Half of this story is the story of that holding.
The Stranger and the Boy
Then a stranger stood at the palace gate, and not one of the suitors turned to look. Prince Telemachus alone ran over and brought the guest inside.
He gave up his seat and set out food, and only then did he ask. “Who are you, sir, and where have you come from?” Feeding a stranger before questioning him was the code of that time, kept exactly.
The traveler was in fact Athena. The goddess looked straight into the boy’s eyes and spoke. “Your father is not dead. Launch a ship and go find word of him. You are not a child any longer.”
Something in the boy woke at those words.
Today, Waiting Is Also a Fight
The next day Telemachus called the first assembly held on Ithaca in twenty years. For the first time the boy spoke aloud in front of the suitors.
“Get out of my house.” The suitors laughed him off, but he was plainly not the child he had been the day before.
This epic begins not with sword and shield but with the people keeping an empty seat. A husband caged by the sea, a wife at the loom, a son growing up.
The war story ended at chapter 50 of Greek Myths, and this is what comes after. It is the story of going back, and that road was longer than the war.