As one of only nine similes in the Odyssey that are longer than five lines, the thematic complexity of the image and its multiple points of contact with Penelope's situation has arrested the attention of many readers.

The island of Ithaki was also the legendary home of Odysseus, though he was exiled by Neoptolemus after the slaughter of Penelope's suitors in the Odyssey.

The Telegony picks up where the Odyssey leaves off, beginning with the burial of the dead suitors, and continues until the death of Odysseus.

In Homer's Odyssey, Penelope ( ; ) is the faithful wife of Odysseus, who keeps her suitors at bay in his long absence and is eventually reunited with him.

In the Odyssey, Orestes is held up as a favorable example to Telemachus, whose mother Penelope is plagued by suitors.

Theophrastus states that King Antigonus made the rigging of his fleet of papyrus, an old practice illustrated by the ship's cable, wherewith the doors were fastened when Odysseus slew the suitors in his hall ( Odyssey xxi.

There is an interesting section in Homer's Odyssey when the suitors attempt to string Odysseus ' bow and are unable to do so, whereas Odysseus is able to string it without standing up.

* In Homer's Odyssey, the number of suitors coveting Penelope, wife of Odysseus.

Dennis R. MacDonald, in The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, notes that a similar episode to the one that occurs in Mark — of a crowd picking one figure over another figure similar to the other — occurred in The Odyssey, where Odysseus entered the palace disguised as a beggar and defeated his wife's suitors to reclaim his throne.

* In Homer ’ s Odyssey, Eurymachus, son of Polybus, is an Ithacan nobleman and one of the two leading suitors of Penelope, the other being Antinous.

He is mentioned in Book 18 of Homer's Odyssey, and is described as the " destroyer of all mortals " by Antinous ( one of the suitors ).

In Homer's legend of the Odyssey, Penelope the faithful wife of Odysseus was a weaver, weaving her design for a shroud by day, but unravelling it again at night, to keep her suitors from claiming her during the long years while Odysseus was away.

In Book XXII of Odyssey, the Greek hero Odysseus slaughters all of the suitors in his palace in another homeric display of martial excellence.

Homer's use of eidolons also extends to the Odyssey where, after the death of the suitors, Theoclymenos notes that he sees the doorway of the court filled with them.

* Eurynomos, in the Odyssey, the third son of Aigyptios, brother of Antiphos and one of the suitors of Penelope.

That such a tradition lies behind The Iliad and The Odyssey, at least, is hard to deny.

One of the greatest Homerists of our time, Frederick M. Combellack, argues that when it is assumed The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral poems, the postulated single redactor called Homer cannot be either credited with or denied originality in choice of phrasing.

Thus one line in five from The Iliad and The Odyssey is to be found somewhere else in the two poems.

Hephaestus is one of the most even-tempered of the Hellenic deities ; in the narrative embedded in the Odyssey Aphrodite seems to prefer Ares, the volatile god of war, as she was attracted to his violent nature.

Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Nineteen Eighty-Four, are not alternate history because the author has not made the conscious choice to change the past.

* In the Odyssey, Calypso is described as having " spread a table with ambrosia and set it by Hermes, and mixed the rosy-red nectar.

He is a significant figure in Homer's Iliad and is also mentioned in the Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.

The Achaeans (, Akhaioí ) is one of the collective names used for the Greeks in Homer's Iliad ( used 598 times ) and Odyssey.

Homer is assumed to refer to this fortification when he mentions the " strong-built House of Erechtheus " ( Odyssey 7. 81 ).

Briefly, the first Aeolus was a son of Hellen and eponymous founder of the Aeolian race ; the second was a son of Poseidon, who led a colony to islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea ; and the third Aeolus was a son of Hippotes who is mentioned in Odyssey book 10 as Keeper of the Winds who gives Odysseus a tightly closed bag full of the captured winds so he could sail easily home to Ithaca on the gentle West Wind.

Another list of Aeolus ' children is found in scholia on the Odyssey.

* 2001 – Mars Odyssey is launched.

* The fictitious interplanetary spacecraft Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov from the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke is powered by a fictitious Sakharov drive.

In 2011, it was announced that Druyan would be part of the writing and production teams for a sequel to COSMOS, to be called Cosmos: A space-time Odyssey, which is expected to be telecast in 2013.

In Greek mythology, Circe (; Greek Κίρκη Kírkē " falcon ") is a minor goddess of magic ( or sometimes a nymph, witch, enchantress or sorceress ), described in Homer's Odyssey as " The loveliest of all immortals ".

In Homer's Odyssey, Circe is described as living in a mansion that stands in the middle of a clearing in a dense wood.

In Homer's Iliad, the horses of the Myrmidons graze on wild celery that grows in the marshes of Troy, and in Odyssey, there is mention of the meadows of violet and wild celery surrounding the cave of Calypso.

In Homer's Odyssey she is the blond-haired goddess who separates the chaff from the grain.

In the 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is described by Dr. Chandra as being caught in a " Hofstadter – Möbius loop ".

Dr. David Bowman is a fictional character in the Space Odyssey series.

In 2061: Odyssey Three, Heywood Floyd is surprised to encounter HAL, now stored alongside Dave Bowman in the Europa monolith.

In the Western classical tradition, Homer (;, Hómēros ) is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet.

The two have merged into one entity called " Halman " after Bowman rescued HAL from the dying Discovery One spaceship towards the end of 2010: Odyssey Two.

Several strategy games, such as Rise of Nations, Rome: Total War, Spartan Total Warrior, Empire Earth, Civilization, Ancient Wars: Sparta, Age of Empires, Etrian Odyssey III: The Drowned City and Age of Mythology, feature infantry units called " Hoplites " or " Phalanx ".

Andronicus also translated Homer's Greek epic the Odyssey into an old type of Latin verse called Saturnian.

Odyssey used a technique called " aerobraking " that gradually brought the spacecraft closer to Mars with each orbit.

Events in the main sequence of the Odyssey ( excluding Odysseus ' embedded narrative of his wanderings ) take place in the Peloponnese and in what are now called the Ionian Islands.

In the Odyssey, however, Zethus's wife is called a daughter of Pandareus in book 19, who killed her son Itylos in a fit of madness and became a nightingale.

Though light guns have been used in earlier arcade games such as Sega's Periscope in 1966 and Missile in 1969, the first home console light gun was released for the Magnavox Odyssey in 1972 ; later on, Nintendo would include one standard on their Famicom and NES, called the NES Zapper.

The works of Homer ( the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns ) and of Hesiod were written in a literary dialect called Homeric Greek or Epic Greek, which largely comprises Old Ionic, with some borrowings from the neighboring Aeolic dialect to the north.

It was commonly attributed to Homer, as by Aristotle ( Poetics 13. 92 ): " His Margites indeed provides an analogy: as are the Iliad and Odyssey to our tragedies, so is the Margites to our comedies "; but the work, among a mixed genre of works loosely labelled " Homerica " in Antiquity, was more reasonably attributed to Pigres, a Greek poet of Halicarnassus, in the massive medieval Greek encyclopedia called Suda.

In Homer's Odyssey, Hesiod's Theogony and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the Sun is once in each work called Hyperionides () ' son of Hyperion ', and Hesiod certainly imagines Hyperion as a separate being in other writings.

However when they got there they found a gigantic woman, the wife of Antiphates who promptly called her husband, who immediately left the assembly of the people and upon arrival snatched up one of the men and killed him on the spot, presumably then drinking his blood ( as it states in the Odyssey that he only met with the men with the intention of drinking their blood ).

The famous ancient Greek poet and writer, Homer, first mentioned the island in his masterpieces, the Iliad and the Odyssey, stating that the first inhabitants of it were the son of King Dardanos of Troy called Zakynthos and his men and that they first came on the island around 1500 – 1600 BC.

The Phaiakians in the Odyssey did not know Odysseus ( although they knew of him, as evidenced by the tales of Demodocus ), so they called him a " stranger ".

A song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds called More News from Nowhere, which is loosely based on the Odyssey, contains a lyric briefly summarizing the story of Odysseus and Calypso.

She has an aquatic counterpart called " havsfrun " or " Havsrå " ( Sea wife / woman ) who is very similar to the Sirens Odysseus meets in the Odyssey.

In level 2, The Subway, there is a room called the " Secret Room of Public Knowledge " which dedicates Robot Odyssey to Warren Robinett, who wrote the animation utility underlying the game.

One Girl One Laptop productions created a spiritual successor called Gate which uses the same digital logic puzzles as Robot Odyssey.

In 1976, journalist Nik Cohn contributed a story called " Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night ," about a young man in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood who, once a week, went to a local disco called Odyssey 2001 ; the story was a sensation and served as the basis for the film Saturday Night Fever.

A team of scientists develop a laser satellite-controlling computer system called MAAX ( Meteoroid and Asteroid Exploder ) to destroy the meteoroid ; however, MAAX develops a personality of its own ( in an obvious parody of the sentient computer HAL from the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey ) and refuses to save the planet unless Earth's scientists can solve seven science riddles.

An add-on, called The Red Odyssey, was later released with an American and a Chinese campaign.

Odyssey of the Mind, often called OM ( although the official acronym is OotM ), is a creative problem-solving competition involving students from kindergarten through college.