🚨 Spoilers ahead. That's the whole point. If you wanted to be surprised, you should have read the book.
Troy has fallen. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, spends ten more years trying to get home. Meanwhile, suitors camp in his house, eating his food and pressing his wife Penelope to remarry. His son Telemachus goes looking for news. Odysseus escapes the Cyclops Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, and loses every crew member. The nymph Calypso holds him seven years. The Phaeacians finally ship him to Ithaca. Disguised as a beggar, he meets Telemachus, tests Penelope, strings his bow, and kills the suitors with help from his son and two herdsmen. Athena ends the feud. Dinner is ruined.
- Odysseus's dog recognizes him first. Argos, left behind as a puppy, lies neglected on a dung heap. He knows Odysseus in his beggar's rags after twenty years, wags his tail, and dies.
- Odysseus blows his own cover to Polyphemus. After blinding the Cyclops under the name Nobody, Odysseus shouts his real name from the departing ship. Polyphemus prays to his father Poseidon, who makes the voyage home far worse.
- Penelope's final test is a bed. To check the beggar's identity, Penelope orders the marriage bed moved. Odysseus snaps that it can't be, because he built it around a living olive tree.
- “Odysseus plugged his ears against the Sirens.” Earplugs, really. Odysseus plugs his crew's ears with beeswax, then has himself tied to the mast so he can hear the song. He is the only one who does.
- “Penelope wove a tapestry for twenty years.” Wrong thread. It is a burial shroud for Odysseus's father Laertes, woven by day and unpicked by night. The stall lasts about three years before a maid betrays her.
- “Odysseus kills the suitors all by himself.” Lone wolf? Hardly. Telemachus and the herdsmen Eumaeus and Philoetius fight beside him, and Athena intervenes in the battle. It is a team fight with divine backup.
- If they say: “Isn't the Odyssey told start to finish?”
You say: “I'd say no. It opens with Telemachus at home, and Odysseus tells the Cyclops and Circe stories himself, in flashback, to the Phaeacians.” - If they say: “Odysseus is the ultimate hero.”
You say: “Sure, though every one of his crew dies, and he reaches Ithaca asleep on a Phaeacian ship. Clever, yes. Lucky, also.”
🍸 Your Bar Line
Twenty years gone, every crewman dead, and the hero gets home with a beggar costume, a bow, and a bed built around an olive tree that only he and Penelope knew about.
