Resumo de Odyssey

The Odyssey is the epic journey of a man who struggles for ten years on the seas, trying to get back to his wife and home, and the adventures he encounters on the way. The Trojan War is over and the victorious Greek chieftains are eager to get back to their various homelands. Odysseus however, through one misfortune after another, is doomed to ten more years of wandering. At home his son Telemachus has grown up and his wife Penelope is beset by suitors, who have practically taken over his house, and who she keeps putting off through subterfuge. Telemachus decides to set off in search of his father. In book five the scene shifts to Odysseus, and we find him on the island of the nymph Calypso, where he has for many years been her prisoner. He finally manages to build a boat and escape, but his boat is wrecked by the vengeful sea god Poseidon. He clings to the wreckage and finally drifts ashore on the island of Phaecia, where the daughter of king Nausicaa finds him and extends a warm welcome. He tells his story to the king and the people ? from the time he left Troy to his imprisonment on Calypso?s island. He narrates how he and his crew met the Lotos Eaters, escaped from the Cyclops Polyphemos by blinding him, thereby incurring the wrath of his father Poseidon, the sea god. They then landed in the clutches of the enchantress Circe, who turned his men into pigs. He rescued his men, and then visited the land of the dead, where he met the shades of many dead friends, among them Agamemnon, Achilles, and his own dead mother. He then sailed past the Sirens, and narrowly escaped Scylla and Charybdis. Then his men violate a taboo, eating cattle sacred to the sun god, and they all die. The Phaecians are much moved on hearing of all these troubles, and offer to take him back to Ithaca themselves. Back in Ithaca, he hears about the menace of the suitors, and decides to go to his home disguised as an old beggar. He meets with his son, and then challenges all the suitors to an archery contest: only he is able to string the great bow, and shoots all of them with it. He then hangs those maidservants who had slept with the suitors. Thus end the great adventures of Odysseus and his decade long homecoming journey.

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