Summary
The Phaeacians load gifts and convey Odysseus home overnight in their supernaturally fast ship. He sleeps the whole way and is laid still sleeping on the beach at the harbour of Phorcys with his treasure beside him.
Poseidon complains to Zeus that his honour is diminished. With Zeus's agreement he turns the returning Phaeacian ship to stone in sight of its own harbour. Alcinous recalls the old prophecy and orders sacrifices.
Odysseus wakes and does not recognise Ithaca; Athena has poured a mist over it. He believes the Phaeacians have cheated him and counts his tripods.
Athena appears as a young shepherd and names the island. Odysseus immediately invents a false life story — a Cretan who killed a man and fled. She changes into a woman, touches him, and laughs: neither of them can outdo the other in guile. She reveals herself, explains her absence, helps him hide the treasure in the cave of the nymphs, and disguises him as a ragged old beggar. She sends him to Eumaeus and goes to fetch Telemachus from Sparta.
Narrative function
Turns the poem from wandering to homecoming, and establishes the disguise that governs the next nine books.
Greek concepts in this book
- dolos
- Guile. Athena's praise of Odysseus for lying to her face is the poem's clearest statement that deception is a virtue in its hero, not a flaw.
- timē
- Honour as due standing. Poseidon's objection is not that Odysseus escaped but that his own timē among gods and men is reduced.
Connections to other books
Book 11
Landing in secret and testing the household follows Agamemnon's advice in the underworld.
Book 14 · Book 19 · Book 24
The Cretan lie told here is the first of a series; Odysseus tells versions of it to Eumaeus, to Penelope, and finally to his own father.
Book 7 · Book 8
The petrified ship is the price of Phaeacian hospitality, foreshadowed in Book 8.
Source notes
The fate of the Phaeacian city is left unresolved: the prophecy includes a mountain closing over the city, and the poem does not say whether Zeus permits it. Ancient and modern readers have both noticed the poem's reluctance to finish the sentence.
Reading it responsibly
The scene between Odysseus and Athena is the warmest in the poem and it consists of two liars enjoying each other. She does not rebuke him for the false story; she is delighted by it. Any reading that treats Odysseus's deceptions as a moral problem the poem wants solved has to explain why his patron goddess finds them charming.