Famous Passages
The moments people half-remember without knowing where they come from. Each one is quoted from Butler's translation and links to the book it sits in, so you can drop straight into the scene.
Tell me, O Muse
Book I →Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.
The poem's opening request: not a song of war but of a man who lost everything on the way back.
The nymph's island
Book V →Thereon Minerva began to tell them of the many sufferings of Ulysses, for she pitied him away there in the house of the nymph Calypso.
The gods finally take up the case of the one Greek who has still not come home.
Nausicaa's blessing
Book VI →May heaven grant you in all things your heart’s desire—husband, house, and a happy, peaceful home; for there is nothing better in this world than that man and wife should be of one mind in a house.
A shipwrecked stranger's parting wish for the girl who found him — and the poem's definition of happiness.
“My name is Noman”
Book IX →Cyclops, you ask my name and I will tell it you; give me, therefore, the present you promised me; my name is Noman;
The most famous trick in the poem: a name that turns the Cyclops's cry for help into a denial that anything is wrong.
Noman is killing me
Book IX →Noman is killing me by fraud; no man is killing me by force.
The trap springs: the neighbours hear that nobody is hurting him, and go back to bed.
The herb against enchantment
Book X →Take this herb, which is one of great virtue, and keep it about you when you go to Circe’s house, it will be a talisman to you against every kind of mischief.
Hermes arms Odysseus against Circe with a plant — the first magical antidote in European literature.
Three times he reaches for his mother
Book XI →Thrice I sprang towards her and tried to clasp her in my arms, but each time she flitted from my embrace as it were a dream or phantom,
Odysseus learns his mother is dead by meeting her, and learns what a ghost is by trying to hold one.
The Sirens' invitation
Book XII →Come here,’ they sang, ‘renowned Ulysses, honour to the Achaean name, and listen to our two voices.
The song itself: the Sirens do not promise pleasure but knowledge — they offer to tell him everything.
Argos the dog
Book XVII →This was Argos, whom Ulysses had bred before setting out for Troy, but he had never had any work out of him.
Twenty years away, and the only one who knows him at once is the dog he raised as a puppy.
The scar
Book XIX →Ulysses sat by the fire, but ere long he turned away from the light, for it occurred to him that when the old woman had hold of his leg she would recognise a certain scar which it bore, whereon the whole truth would come out.
The recognition scene the whole tradition remembers: the nurse washing a beggar's feet is about to find the old boar-wound.
Stringing the bow
Book XXI →But Ulysses, when he had taken it up and examined it all over, strung it as easily as a skilled bard strings a new peg of his lyre and makes the twisted gut fast at both ends.
The suitors could not bend it. He strings it the way a musician strings an instrument — and the comparison is the point.
The first arrow
Book XXII →The arrow struck Antinous in the throat, and the point went clean through his neck, so that he fell over and the cup dropped from his hand, while a thick stream of blood gushed from his nostrils.
The slaughter begins mid-drink, without warning or challenge.
The secret of the bed
Book XXIII →There is no man living, however strong and in his prime, who could move it from its place, for it is a marvellous curiosity which I made with my very own hands.
Penelope's final test. Only three people alive know the bed cannot be moved, because it is built from a living olive tree.
The old man in the orchard
Book XXIV →When Ulysses saw him so worn, so old and full of sorrow, he stood still under a tall pear tree and began to weep.
The last recognition: a son watching his father, ragged and grieving, dig in the garden that raised him.
Quotations are from Samuel Butler's 1900 translation, which is in the public domain and published here in full.