Odysseus arrives in Ithaca

The story of Odysseus's wanderings ends. The Phaeacians load his ship with gifts — gold, bronze, woven cloth — and sail him home. The voyage that has cost ten years takes one night. He sleeps on the deck. They lay him gently on the shore of Ithaca, asleep, with his treasure piled around him, and turn the ship homeward. (Poseidon, on their way back, turns their ship to stone in punishment for helping his enemy — a small, harsh footnote to one of the most generous moments in the poem, and the reason the Phaeacians never sail for strangers again.)

Odysseus wakes. Athena has thrown a mist around the harbor; he does not recognize his own country. He thinks the Phaeacians have cheated him and weeps. A young shepherd appears on the path; he asks where he is. “This is Ithaca,” the shepherd says — and Odysseus, instinctively cautious, immediately invents an elaborate false story about who he is and how he got there. The shepherd starts to laugh. The shepherd is Athena. She drops the disguise — she is delighted by his lying, she says; she has missed him; he is exactly the man she remembered.

They sit together on the beach and plan. She tells him the state of his house, the names of the suitors, who is loyal and who is not. She turns him into an old beggar — wrinkled face, bent back, ragged clothes. He does not need to fight a hundred men in single combat. He needs to walk into his own house unrecognized and study them, one by one, before he chooses how to kill them. The chapter is the hinge of the poem: the wandering ends here, but the hard work of homecoming has not yet begun.