The glossary.
The characters who walk the poem — Odysseus, Penelope, Athena, Polyphemus. The gods and creatures they meet. The places they pass through. The objects they carry. And the Greek concepts — xenia, nostos, hubris, kleos — that thread the whole story. Click any entry for the long form.
Moly
A magical herb given to Odysseus by Hermes, the only protection that works against Circe's transformation magic.
Places 2
Ithaca, Troy, the underworld — the geography of the wandering.
- Agora The public square — civic gathering place, marketplace, court, and stage where the Greeks did most of their actual democracy.
- Megaron The great hall at the heart of a Mycenaean palace — feast room, throne room, and stage for almost every important scene in the Odyssey.
Objects 2
The bow, moly, the obol — things that carry weight in the story.
- Obol A small ancient Greek coin — the fee paid to Charon to ferry the dead across the river Styx into the underworld.
- Moly A magical herb given to Odysseus by Hermes, the only protection that works against Circe's transformation magic.
Concepts 6
Xenia, nostos, hubris, kleos — the Greek ideas threading the poem.
- Nostos Homecoming — not just the return journey, but the soul's hard task of becoming someone capable of arriving.
- Xenia Sacred guest-friendship — the host-guest bond protected by Zeus himself, the basis of every encounter in the Odyssey.
- Hubris Excessive pride — specifically, the kind that mistakes mortal achievement for divine standing and invites the gods' correction.
- Kleos Glory through deeds — the renown that survives the body, the only form of immortality the Greek hero gets.
- Shade A Homeric ghost — the bodiless remnant of a person in the underworld, recognisable but stripped of strength, voice, and substance.
- Cyclopean Built of stones so massive that, to the Greeks, only Cyclopes could have lifted them — the architecture of an older, vanished world.