The Wanderings of Odysseus

“This is the story of Odysseus, and the many adventures he met with on the long sea-road back to Ithaca.”

Rosemary Sutcliff states the premise of her story at the novel’s outset, promising a retelling of Homer’s Odyssey that will serve as a kind of companion to her earlier novel Black Ships Before Troy, a retelling—in part—of Homer’s Iliad (and other ancient mythological narratives describing the Trojan War). Through all his “many adventures,” Odysseus’s desire to return home to Ithaca, where his family is waiting for him, will remain at the forefront of the hero’s mind, and points to the relationship the novel draws between Heroism and the Quest for Home.

“Now, the people of that island were kind and friendly. But they ate nothing but the fruit of the lotus flowers that grew there, and whoever tasted that fruit lost all knowledge of past and future, all wish to be up and doing, and drowsed their time away, always in the present moment of warm sunshine and dappled shade, dreaming happy dreams and forgetting all the world.”

The Lotus Eaters, whose diet deprives them of “all wish to be up and doing,” represent the antithesis of the heroic ideal embodied by Odysseus, the “Sacker of Cities” who will stop at nothing to reach home. Like many Greek heroes, Odysseus must reject a pleasant life of ease (represented, in this case, by the Lotus Eaters) if he is to be a true hero.

“‘As to this Zeus whom you call the All-Father,’ said the giant, ‘we the Cyclops do not care an overripe fig for him, or for all his fellow gods save for Poseidon, who is our father, for we are stronger than they are, and have no need to obey any will but our own!’”

The Cyclops Polyphemus rejects Odysseus’s request for hospitality and even denies the power of the gods, which Sutcliff implies to be a sign of his uncivilized nature.