Summary
They return to Aeaea, bury Elpenor, and receive Circe's sailing instructions.
At the Sirens, Odysseus plugs the crew's ears with wax and has himself bound to the mast, so that he alone hears. What the Sirens promise is knowledge — they claim to know everything that happened at Troy and everything that happens on earth.
Circe has offered a choice between the Wandering Rocks and the strait of Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus takes the strait, and on Circe's explicit advice does not tell the crew about Scylla. Six men are taken, calling his name; he says it was the most pitiful thing he saw.
At Thrinacia the crew swear not to touch the cattle of the Sun. Contrary winds hold them a month and the food runs out. While Odysseus sleeps, Eurylochus persuades the men to kill the cattle. Helios demands justice from Zeus; when they sail, the ship is destroyed by a thunderbolt and all the crew drown. Odysseus, clinging to the keel and mast, is carried back to Charybdis and survives by hanging from a fig tree until the wreckage is disgorged. Nine days later he reaches Ogygia. The tale ends, and the poem returns to the Phaeacian hall.
Narrative function
Closes the first-person narrative and returns the poem to its present, with the hero alone and the crew accounted for.
Greek concepts in this book
- atasthaliai
- Reckless acts — the word from the proem, discharged here. The poem's opening promise that the men destroyed themselves is kept in Book 12.
- nostos
- Homecoming, achieved by exactly one man. The poem is precise about the cost of the return it celebrates.
Connections to other books
Book 1
Completes the proem's statement that Odysseus could not save his companions, who perished by their own recklessness.
Book 11
Tiresias's prophecy is fulfilled in every particular.
Book 9
The crew's disobedience closes an arc that began at Ismarus.
Source notes
The Sirens are two in Homer, not the later canonical three, and are not described physically at all; the bird-bodied iconography comes from later art. What they offer is knowledge rather than sexual temptation — a distinction almost universally lost in modern retellings.
Reading it responsibly
The Scylla passage is the poem's hardest test of its hero. Circe tells him to accept losing six men rather than lose the ship; he does; and he concealed the danger from the men who were about to die. The poem lets him call it the most pitiful sight of all his sufferings, and does not indicate that he was wrong. Leadership in the Odyssey involves knowingly spending people, and the poem neither hides this nor condemns it.