Works

The Odyssey

Citation Formats

General Reference

Literature Atlas. "The Odyssey." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/works/the-odyssey.

APA Style

Literature Atlas. (n.d.). The Odyssey. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/works/the-odyssey

BibTeX

@misc{literatureatlas-the-odyssey,
  author = {Literature Atlas},
  title = {The Odyssey},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://literature.interactiveatlas.org/works/the-odyssey},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

An ancient Greek epic poem attributed to Homer, recounting the ten-year journey of Odysseus home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy, and the parallel story of his son Telemachus and his wife Penelope holding off her suitors in his absence. Like the Iliad, the poem descends from an oral performance tradition, composed in dactylic hexameter and built from formulaic phrases suited to improvisation, before it was fixed in writing. Its structure, opening in the middle of the action and unfolding Odysseus' earlier wanderings in his own retrospective narration, became a durable model for narrative poetry told out of chronological order.

Facts

Disputed

Composed, From (Year)

from 700 BCE 1

Dated by scholarly convention to the eighth or seventh century BCE; as an oral-tradition poem fixed in writing only later, no single composition date is settled.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Authored By

Homer

Why this is disputed. Homeric authorship of the Odyssey is separately and more sharply debated than the Iliad's in modern Homeric scholarship; see The Homeric Question.

Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature