At the beginning of The Odyssey, Odysseus is trapped on Calypso's island; she keeps him a captive there because she is in love with him and does not want him to return to his wife, Penelope, in Ithaca. The narrator says,
But one man alone …
his heart set on his wife and his return—Calypso,
the bewitching nymph, the lustrous goddess, held him back,
deep in her arching caverns, craving him for a husband.
She wants him to be her husband, but Odysseus still wants to get home to his own family.
Penelope is stuck between a rock and a hard place. She wants to be loyal to her husband, Odysseus, but she also doesn't want to anger the suitors at her home. When the bard at her home begins to sing a song about her husband, she says,
But break off this song—
the unendurable song that always...
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rends the heart inside me …
the unforgettable grief, it wounds me most of all!
How I long for my husband—alive in memory, always [...].
Penelope is still obviously attached to Odysseus, though she has not seen him in close to twenty years. This lengthy absence convinces others that he is dead, but Penelope is not convinced; this explains her inner conflict.
Telemachus is angry about all of the suitors that have crowded his home, eating and drinking up the family's resources. They want to marry his mother, and they are exploiting Greek rules of hospitality in the meantime. Describing the suitors, he says, "down to the last man they court my mother, they lay waste my house!"
Homer's Odyssey is one of many ancient Greek literary works focused on the returns of the Greeks from the war in Troy. The Odyssey tells the story of the wanderings of Odysseus on his way back to Penelope. What makes the story so engaging is that each of the characters is in a difficult situation, and the narrative arc moves in parallel towards a resolution of these conflicts.
Odysseus has been away from home for twenty years fighting alongside the other Greeks in the Trojan war. After the war ended, he was help captive by the nymph Calypso and then angered Poseidon by killing Polyphemus, as well as enduring many other adventures and obstacles in his homeward journey. Eventually, with the aid of the goddess Athena, he manages to return home to Ithaca.
Penelope has been waiting at home faithfully for Odysseus to return from the war. Various suitors, claiming that Odysseus must be dead, demand that Penelope choose one of them to marry and to become lord of Ithaca. Penelope promises she will decide when she finishes weaving a shroud for Laertes, but although she weaves by day, she undoes her weaving by night.
Telemachus is the son of Odysseus and has been growing up at home with his mother. Although he isn't old or powerful enough to challenge the suitors himself, Athena prompts him to begin a journey to find out the fate of his father and gain potential allies.