The Odyssey Explained: The Complete Story of Odysseus' 10 Year Journey Home

The Odyssey explained: the complete story of Odysseus and the ten year journey home from Troy to Ithaca, told start to finish in one episode. There is a scar above a man's knee, put there by a boar's tusk when he was a boy, and twenty years later it is still there under a beggar's rags, waiting to give him away. This is the story of how far he had to travel, and how much of himself he had to bury, to earn the right to be recognized by that one small mark again. Troy has fallen, the plunder is loaded, and the voyage should take weeks. It takes a decade, and it costs him every man who sails with him: eaten in the cave of the Cyclops, drowned within sight of Ithaca when a crew opens a bag they were told not to touch, turned to swine in a witch's hall, and finally destroyed for slaughtering cattle they had sworn to leave alone. You will meet Polyphemus and the trick with the name, Circe on Aeaea, the ghost of Tiresias in the land of the dead, the Sirens and the passage between Scylla and Charybdis, seven years on Calypso's island, and at the far end of it a palace on Ithaca full of men eating a missing king's food, a nurse who knows a scar when she washes it, and a wife who sets one last test that only a husband could pass. What the poem finally offers is not a triumph but a homecoming, quiet and hard won, and the harder truth that a man can survive everything and still have to prove who he is at his own door. If a moment from this one stays with you, let me know which one in the comments, I read every one. Subscribe to The Lamplit Age for more true stories from history, told in full. Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 1:03 Smoke Over Troy 4:40 The Cave of the Cyclops 8:09 The Bag of Winds 11:45 The Witch of Aeaea 15:12 The House of the Dead 18:21 Between Song and Rock 21:37 The Cattle of the Sun 24:47 Seven Years on Ogygia 28:10 Washed Ashore 31:52 The Tale Told at Court 35:38 The Beggar at the Gate 39:11 A House Under Siege 42:47 The Scar Remembered 46:08 The Bow That Would Not Bend 49:30 The Test of the Bed 53:01 Conclusion #TheOdyssey #GreekMythology #HistoryForSleep