Data stories · Homer
Half of the Odyssey Happens on Ithaca
Count the words instead of the years and the Odyssey is not a voyage. Nearly half of it is a man in his own house in rags, deciding whom to tell — and the dog finds out before anyone.
The Trojan War took ten years and Homer gave the journey home ten more. Count the words instead of the years and the ratio is sharper still. The wanderings everyone remembers — the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, the cattle of the Sun — take up 18% of the Odyssey, told in 4 books at a dinner table. Nearly half the poem, 49%, is Ithaca: 12 books in which the hero is home and almost nobody knows it.
- Telemachus searches (Odysseus absent)
- Calypso to Phaeacia
- The wanderings, told at the feast
- Ithaca
The hero is absent from the first four books, which belong to his son, and present in them anyway: Odysseus is the most-mentioned figure on the map of the poem, with 79 lines to other figures and 28 names folded into him, from “goodly Odysseus” to “the beggar” to Noman. He appears in Book V, weeping on Calypso’s shore, and tells his own wanderings in Books IX–XII. From Book XIII to the end he is on Ithaca, and the poem slows down: the longest stretch of the Odyssey is not the voyage. It is a man standing in his own house in rags, deciding whom to tell.
Who knows he is home
8 figures learn that the stranger is Odysseus between his landing in Book XIII and his father in Book XXIV. The order is the poem’s argument: a goddess, then his son, then his dog, then his nurse, then two herdsmen, then his enemies, then his wife, then his father. The dog knows before any person in the household. The wife is told only after the killing, in Book XXIII, and even then she tests him first.
| Book | Who learns | How |
|---|---|---|
| IX | The Phaeacians | He names himself before telling his wanderings.“I am ODYSSEUS, SON OF LAERTES, who am in men’s minds for all manner of wiles, and my fame reaches unto heaven.” |
| XIII | Athene | She lifts her own disguise and his mist.“thou hast indeed returned from wandering, but in silence endure much sorrow, submitting thee to the despite of men.” |
| XVI | Telemachus | Athene restores his looks in the swineherd’s hut.“Behold, no god am I; why likenest thou me to the immortals? nay, thy father am I, for whose sake thou sufferest many pains and groanest sore.” |
| XVII | Argos | The dog knows him at the gate and dies.“Yet even now when he was ware of Odysseus standing by, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had not now the strength to draw.” |
| XIX | Eurycleia | The nurse finds the boar’s scar while washing his feet.“Yea verily, thou art Odysseus, my dear child, and I knew thee not before, till I had handled all the body of my lord.” |
| XXI | Eumaeus and Philoetius | He shows the herdsmen the scar before the bow.“Therewith he drew aside the rags from the great scar. And when the twain had beheld it and marked it well, they cast their arms about the wise Odysseus, and fell a weeping.” |
| XXII | The suitors | He strips off his rags and shoots Antinous.“Ye dogs, ye said in your hearts that I should never more come home from the land of the Trojans, in that ye wasted my house.” |
| XXIII | Penelope | She orders the bed moved; only he knows it cannot be.“So she spake and made trial of her lord, but Odysseus in sore displeasure spake to his true wife, saying: “Verily a bitter word is this, lady, that thou hast spoken. Who has set my bed otherwhere?” |
| XXIV | Laertes | His father asks for a token; he shows the scar and names the trees.“Look first on this scar and consider it, that the boar dealt me with his white tusk on Parnassus, whither I had gone, and thou didst send me forth.” |
The map ties every one of these 8 figures to Odysseus, but a map records who is bound to whom, not when they find out: only 3 of the lines carry the recognition itself in the passage they quote — Athene lifting the mist, Argos wagging his tail, Eurycleia finding the scar. Telemachus, Penelope and Laertes are on the map as son, wife and father, with lines quoted from earlier books, and the scene in which each of them learns the truth is in the text, not on the map. That gap is the difference between a map and a story.
The violence comes home too
What follows the recognitions is the part retellings soften. Homer counts the suitors in Book XVI, when Telemachus itemizes them for his father by island, and the total is 108:
| From | Suitors |
|---|---|
| Dulichium | 52 |
| Same | 24 |
| Zacynthus | 20 |
| Ithaca | 12 |
| All | 108 |
Of those 108, the poem gives names to a few dozen and the map carries 16 of them as figures. In Book XXII every suitor dies, and the text names 14 of the dead along with the man who killed each one. Four men do all the named killing, and it is a family affair: the father, the son, and the two herdsmen who stayed loyal.
| Killed | By | On the map | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Antinous | Odysseus | The man, not the death | The map’s line records the footstool he threw in Book XVII, not the arrow through his throat. |
| Eurymachus | Odysseus | As a line | |
| Amphinomus | Telemachus | As a line | |
| Demoptolemus | Odysseus | As a line | |
| Euryades | Telemachus | No | Named once in the poem, in the sentence that kills him. |
| Elatus | Eumaeus | The man, not the death | |
| Peisandrus | Philoetius | The man, not the death | |
| Eurydamas | Odysseus | As a line | |
| Amphimedon | Telemachus | As a line | A second line credits Odysseus, from Amphimedon’s own ghost in Book XXIV, who names no one. |
| Polybus | Eumaeus | No | The map’s only Polybus is the Egyptian of Book IV. |
| Ctesippus | Philoetius | As a line | |
| Agelaus | Odysseus | As a line | |
| Leocritus | Telemachus | As a line | |
| Leiodes | Odysseus | As a line | The priest, who begs at his knees and is beheaded as he speaks. |
The map carries 9 of the 14 deaths as lines, with the passage behind each; 2 of the dead are not on it at all, men the poem names once in the sentence that kills them. The killing is not where the poem stops. Book XXIV opens with the suitors’ families arming for revenge, and the cycle ends only because a goddess steps in — twice — to stop it. Peace, in the Odyssey, is not what follows victory on its own. It is an intervention.
How this was counted
Word counts are of the Butcher & Lang translation, the public-domain prose Odyssey the map was made from, book by book, with the editors’ footnotes removed. A recognition is the scene in which a figure learns that the stranger is Odysseus, with the line that shows it, every quote under 50 words. A suitor’s death is a named man in Book XXII whom the text says fell, with the killer the sentence names; Agelaus, whom the text first wounds and then calls slain, is credited to Odysseus. Where the map lacks a line for an event the ledger says so. Select any figure on the interactive map to read the passage behind each line it does have.
The Odyssey, translated by S. H. Butcher and A. Lang (1879), public domain, via Project Gutenberg (eBook #1728). Every number on this page is computed from the map’s own data, so the charts and the map can never disagree.
Open the full interactive map → Or read the The Odyssey character map, the page this story is drawn from. Map a text of your own and read it the same way.