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.
Moly
A magical herb given to Odysseus by Hermes, the only protection that works against Circe's transformation magic.
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.