The glossary.
The characters who walk the poem — Odysseus, Penelope, Athena, Polyphemus. The gods and creatures they meet. The places they pass through. The objects they carry. And the Greek concepts — xenia, nostos, hubris, kleos — that thread the whole story. Click any entry for the long form.
Circe
Sorceress on the island of Aeaea. Turns Odysseus's men into pigs, then becomes his lover and adviser for a year.
People 3
Mortals — Odysseus, Penelope, Telemachus, the suitors, the kings.
- Odysseus King of Ithaca, husband of Penelope, the man who survives. Wily, patient, and willing to lie his way home.
- Penelope Wife of Odysseus and queen of Ithaca. Holds the household together for twenty years against a hundred suitors with patience and a loom.
- Telemachus Son of Odysseus and Penelope. Grew up without his father; the first four books of the Odyssey are his story of becoming a man.
Gods 4
Athena, Poseidon, Zeus, Hermes — the immortals who shape the journey.
- Athena Goddess of wisdom, craft, and strategic war. Odysseus's patron and protector — the divine voice in his ear all the way home.
- Poseidon God of the sea, earthquakes, and horses. The Odyssey's chief antagonist — Odysseus blinded his son, and the sea-god takes ten years to forgive.
- Calypso Sea-nymph who keeps Odysseus on her island Ogygia for seven years. Loves him, offers him immortality, and has to be ordered by Zeus to let him go.
- Circe Sorceress on the island of Aeaea. Turns Odysseus's men into pigs, then becomes his lover and adviser for a year.
Creatures 2
Cyclops, sirens, Charybdis — the not-quite-mortal, not-quite-divine.
- Polyphemus One-eyed cyclops, son of Poseidon. Eats Odysseus's men. Gets blinded by a sharpened olive stake and a man calling himself "Nobody."
- Sirens Singing creatures whose voices lure sailors onto the rocks. Odysseus is the only man to hear their song and live to describe it.
Places 2
Ithaca, Troy, the underworld — the geography of the wandering.
- Agora The public square — civic gathering place, marketplace, court, and stage where the Greeks did most of their actual democracy.
- Megaron The great hall at the heart of a Mycenaean palace — feast room, throne room, and stage for almost every important scene in the Odyssey.
Objects 2
The bow, moly, the obol — things that carry weight in the story.
- Obol A small ancient Greek coin — the fee paid to Charon to ferry the dead across the river Styx into the underworld.
- Moly A magical herb given to Odysseus by Hermes, the only protection that works against Circe's transformation magic.
Concepts 6
Xenia, nostos, hubris, kleos — the Greek ideas threading the poem.
- Nostos Homecoming — not just the return journey, but the soul's hard task of becoming someone capable of arriving.
- Xenia Sacred guest-friendship — the host-guest bond protected by Zeus himself, the basis of every encounter in the Odyssey.
- Hubris Excessive pride — specifically, the kind that mistakes mortal achievement for divine standing and invites the gods' correction.
- Kleos Glory through deeds — the renown that survives the body, the only form of immortality the Greek hero gets.
- Shade A Homeric ghost — the bodiless remnant of a person in the underworld, recognisable but stripped of strength, voice, and substance.
- Cyclopean Built of stones so massive that, to the Greeks, only Cyclopes could have lifted them — the architecture of an older, vanished world.