What was the Odyssey about?
Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, was only one day old when Odysseus set out for Troy. At the point where the Odyssey begins, ten further years after the end of the ten-year Trojan War, Telemachus is twenty and is sharing his missing father’s house on the island of Ithaca with his mother, Penelope, and with a crowd of 108 boisterous young men, “the Suitors,” whose aim is to persuade Penelope to accept her husband’s disappearance as final and to marry one of them. The goddess Athena (who is Odysseus’s protector) discusses his fate with Zeus, king of the gods, at a moment when Odysseus’s enemy, the god of the Sea Poseidon, is absent from Mount Olympus. Then, disguised as a Taphian chieftain named Mentes, she visits Telemachus to urge him to search for news of his father. He offers her hospitality; they observe the Suitors dining rowdily, and the bard Phemius performing a narrative poem for them. Penelope objects to Phemius’s theme, the “Return from Troy”[4] because it reminds her of her missing
