Ten years of war are over. Twelve ships, fifty men to a ship — six hundred set sail for home.

The wind carries the fleet to the Cicones. They sack the city; the counter-attack costs six men from every ship.

Rounding Malea for the last easy leg home, a nine-day storm drives them south past Cythera — off the chart of the known world.

Landfall among the lotus-eaters. Three scouts taste the fruit and forget home; Odysseus drags them back to the benches and ties them under the thwarts.

They beach below Etna. Six men are eaten in the cave before the stake goes into the eye — and the boast on the way out earns Poseidon’s grudge for the rest of the voyage.

Aeolus, keeper of the winds, ties every contrary wind into a bag and hands it over. Nine days of fair sailing east.

Close enough to see men tending fires on the home shore. Odysseus, nine days at the steering oar without rest, finally sleeps.

The crew open the bag looking for silver. The storm throws them the whole way back to Aeolia — and this time Aeolus refuses to help a man the gods clearly hate.

Six days of rowing north. In the closed harbour the giants spear eleven ships like fish. Only the flagship, moored outside, escapes: 484 men gone in an afternoon.

On Aeaea Circe turns the scouts to swine, then keeps the crew a year at her table. One man lost — Elpenor, off the roof. From her island they sail to the land of the dead and back, to ask a ghost the way home.

Past the Sirens with wax in every ear and Odysseus lashed to the mast — the only man to hear the song and live to report it.

In the strait at Messina, Scylla takes six men off the deck — the price, Circe said, of not losing the whole ship to Charybdis.

Weather-bound a month on the island of the Sun, the starving crew slaughter the cattle of Helios. The storm that follows splinters the ship; one man rides the keel.

Seven years on Ogygia — most of the voyage is this wait. Then Hermes brings the order Calypso cannot refuse: let him go.

A raft, a last storm from Poseidon, two days swimming. Nausicaa finds him on the Phaeacian beach — and the Phaeacians owe every guest a passage home.

A Phaeacian ship lands one sleeping man on his own beach. 600 left; one returns.