The Wanderings of Odysseus

In a short Prologue, the author summarizes the story of the decade-long siege of Troy, which began when Paris, the Trojan prince, took Helen, the wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, away with him to Troy, and Menelaus and his brother Agamemnon amassed a large Greek army to sail to Troy to get her back. In the 10th year of the war, the Greek hero Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, devised the ploy of the wooden horse. The Greeks built a huge, hollow horse out of wood and hid some of their best fighters inside. They then left the horse on the beach of Troy and feigned a retreat. When the Trojans brought the horse inside their walls, the hidden Greek soldiers waited until nightfall before emerging from a hidden trap door to open the gates of Troy to the rest of the Greek army. Troy was sacked, and the Greeks sailed home, but while some of the Greeks came home quickly and safely, others faced difficulties on the way. In this novel, Rosemary Sutcliff describes the perils Odysseus encountered “on the long sea-road back to Ithaca” (7).