A Greek scholar in the second century BCE counted the episodes. The total was seventeen. Across twenty-four books of poetry, the hero of the Odyssey weeps openly seventeen times. At meals, in front of his men, before strangers, at the sound of his own story being sung back to him by a bard who does not know who he is.
The Iliad heroes were not like this. Achilles raged. Ajax brooded. Hector grieved his city. Odysseus cries. He is the protagonist of one of the two foundational works of Western literature, and his most consistent character trait is that he is, by modern reckoning, a deeply emotional middle-aged man having a hard time.
It gets stranger.
He lies in almost every book
Homer's first description of Odysseus, in the opening line of the poem, is one untranslatable word: polytropos. Literally "many-turned" or "many-ways." Translators have tried "complicated" (Emily Wilson), "of many devices" (Lattimore), "of twists and turns" (Fagles). The word is praise in Greek and slightly insulting in every modern language it lands in.
What it means in practice is that Odysseus lies. Constantly. To Athena, who is in disguise testing him, he invents a long Cretan biography on the spot. To the swineherd Eumaeus, his most loyal servant, he invents another Cretan biography. To Penelope before he reveals himself, he invents a third. To his own father Laertes, who has aged into a broken old man in his absence, he hesitates, considers telling the truth, and then invents a fourth Cretan biography for no clear reason before relenting and admitting who he is. Laertes weeps with relief. Odysseus, characteristically, weeps too.
The Greeks loved this. Polytropos was a compliment. Cunning was the highest civilian virtue: Athena, his patron goddess, embodied exactly the same trait. He was not Achilles, the prince who killed in the open. He was the king of small rocky Ithaca who came home through deception, and won.
Nobody hurt me
The most famous of the lies is also the most childish, and it works.
Trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who has already eaten six of his men, Odysseus gets the giant drunk on wine and tells him his name is Outis. It means "Nobody." The Cyclops, drunk and trusting, replies that as a gift he will eat Nobody last. Odysseus then drives a sharpened stake into his eye. The Cyclops screams for help. The other cyclopes come running to the mouth of the cave and ask through the boulder what is wrong.
Nobody is killing me by guile, not by force.
The other cyclopes shrug and go home.
It is a five-year-old's joke and it saves the entire crew. Odysseus, escaping with his men strapped under the bellies of the cyclops's rams, cannot help himself. As his ship pulls away from the island he shouts back his real name, the city he is from, his father's name. The Cyclops, now blind, asks his father Poseidon to make sure Odysseus never reaches home. Poseidon agrees. The next nine years happen because Odysseus could not resist a brand reveal.
Every one of his men dies
The Odyssey is, in the simplest reading, the story of a king coming home. In a slightly less simple reading, it is the story of a king coming home alone after killing everyone he travelled with.
He sets out from Troy with twelve ships. The Cicones kill seventy-two men in a raid Odysseus authorised. The Laestrygonians smash eleven of the twelve ships with boulders and eat most of the crews. Scylla, the six-headed monster, plucks six men off the deck and eats them in front of him; he does not tell them this will happen in advance because he is afraid they will panic. The remaining men open the bag of winds (a gift from Aeolus, against orders) and blow them back to where they started. They eat the cattle of the sun god Helios (against orders) and Zeus splits the last ship with a thunderbolt. By Book 12 every man is dead. Odysseus washes up on Calypso's island, alone.
He does not, in the text, seem especially troubled by this. He grieves for individuals. The structural fact that he is a captain without a single surviving crewman is never reckoned with directly.
The two goddesses
Penelope, at home in Ithaca, weaves a shroud during the day and unweaves it at night to delay 108 suitors who have moved into her husband's house and are eating his livestock. She does this, the poem tells us, for three full years before a maid betrays her. She remains famously, fiercely loyal.
Odysseus, meanwhile, spends one year in the bed of the witch Circe and seven on the island of Calypso, who keeps him as a lover. The text does not blame him for this. Circe is an obstacle; Calypso is an obstacle with sex. He cries on Calypso's beach every day for seven years, looking out at the sea and longing for Penelope, but he goes back inside every night.
Calypso eventually offers him immortality. She will make him a god if he stays. He turns her down. He wants to be mortal, with Penelope, on Ithaca, where everything will eventually die. It is one of the most extraordinary refusals in literature, and a Greek listener would have understood it as the entire point of the poem: that nostos, the homecoming, was worth more than divinity.
Then he comes home and kills 120 people
The last six books of the Odyssey are not about wandering. They are about an old soldier returning to a house that has been occupied by 108 idle aristocrats for ten years, recognising who is loyal and who is not, and then methodically killing the disloyal ones with a bow.
He kills all 108 suitors. He hangs twelve maids who had been sleeping with them, in what is one of the most disturbing passages in ancient literature. He kills a goatherd who collaborated, slowly. Then he sits down with Penelope, who tests him with a riddle about the immovable bed he carved for her years before from a living olive tree. He passes. They weep, together this time, and go to bed.
The poem ends with Athena calling a truce between the king and the families of the men he has killed. It is not a tidy ending. The Odyssey is a homecoming with very heavy weather around it.
Why this poem still works as a beginner reader
The strangest thing about the Odyssey, for a modern reader, is how easy it is to follow.
Homer composed orally, in front of audiences, with a memory-aid technique built into the line. He used formulae: rosy-fingered dawn, wine-dark sea, much-enduring Odysseus. The same epithet recurs every time the same thing happens. The same scene of arrival, hospitality, food, story is repeated in seven different palaces with the same vocabulary. The same Trojan-horse story is retold by three different characters in three different books. This was not bad style. It was a deliberate aid to listeners, and, accidentally, to anyone learning the language two and a half thousand years later.
For language learners, repetition is not boredom. Repetition is the lesson. Homer's structural redundancy meant that ancient Greek students cut their teeth on the Odyssey before tackling Plato or Demosthenes. The vocabulary kept resurfacing. The plot moved fast. The hero was, against expectation, a man you could understand: he lied, he cried, he loved his wife, he was tired, he wanted to go home.
The longer shelf
Storica's Odyssey is an A2 adaptation in seven languages. The selection keeps the strangenesses intact: the seventeen weepings, the Nobody trick, the men who do not come back. It loses the formulaic redundancy of the original Greek for the practical reason that A2 learners do not need rosy-fingered dawn on every page. What it keeps is the shape of the poem: the wandering, the cunning, the homecoming.
If you finish that and want more Homer, the Iliad is on the shelf at B1. Same author, same world, fifty pages earlier in the story. Achilles, not Odysseus. Rage, not cunning. A different argument for what makes a man.
I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. We adapt classics, including the Odyssey with every weeping intact, into A0–B2 readings of about fifteen minutes a day, in seven languages.