GREEK LITERATURE & CULTURE
Greek Literature and the Tragic Vision
Ian Johnston explores how Greek ideas of justice, divine power, and human freedom shaped the heroic and tragic vision of ancient Greek literature.
Read resource →THE ODYSSEY
You Speak More Homer Than You Think
You may never have sailed past the Sirens or faced a Cyclops, but you probably speak Homer's language more often than you realize. From odyssey and mentor to siren song, lotus-eater, and between Scylla and Charybdis, discover how a 3,000-year-old poem still lives on in the words and expressions we use today.
By A Richer Resources Publications Exclusive
Published September 1, 2026
How The Odyssey Lives On in Our Language
You do not have to have read The Odyssey to speak its language.
Take a long and eventful journey and you have been on an odyssey. Turn to an experienced adviser and you have found a mentor. Give in to an irresistible but dangerous attraction and you have answered a siren song. Find yourself trapped between two terrible alternatives and you are between Scylla and Charybdis.
Three thousand years after Homer, The Odyssey is still hiding in plain sight in the way we speak.
Some of these words came directly from characters in the poem. Others grew out of its stories and images. Still others have more complicated histories, but illuminate ideas that lie at the very heart of Odysseus's journey.
Together they reveal something remarkable about the afterlife of a great work of literature. We have not simply continued to read The Odyssey. We have absorbed pieces of it into our language.
Odyssey: A Man Becomes a Journey
The most obvious example is the title itself.
The Odyssey takes its name from its hero, Odysseus. But in English, odyssey long ago escaped the boundaries of Homer's poem. It can now describe almost any long, wandering, eventful journey—especially one involving difficulties, discoveries or changes of fortune.
Someone can have an odyssey across a continent, through a career, through the legal system or even through years of scientific research.
That broader meaning preserves something essential about Homer's story. Odysseus does not simply travel from Troy to Ithaca. He is blown off course, detained, shipwrecked, tempted, threatened and repeatedly forced to improvise. His ten-year voyage home becomes the model for a journey whose importance lies as much in what happens along the way as in reaching the destination.
The name of one ancient traveler eventually became a word for the journey itself.
Mentor: From One Man to Every Trusted Guide
Perhaps the most surprising Homeric word hiding in everyday English is mentor.
Mentor is not originally a job description. He is a person.
In The Odyssey, Mentor is an old friend of Odysseus, who entrusts his household to him when he leaves for Troy. More importantly for the word's later history, the goddess Athena assumes Mentor's appearance while advising and encouraging Odysseus's son Telemachus.
Over time, the proper name Mentor acquired a broader meaning: a wise and trusted adviser, particularly one who guides someone younger or less experienced.
Today we have mentors in schools, universities, businesses, sports and nearly every profession. We speak of mentoring programs and mentorship without giving much thought to the elderly Ithacan whose name stands behind them.
The transformation is wonderfully appropriate. A character associated with guidance in a story about a young man's development became the name we give to the people who guide us.
The Siren Song: When Attraction Is the Danger
The Sirens gave English something darker.
In The Odyssey, Odysseus is warned that the Sirens' song is irresistible. Those who hear it are drawn toward destruction. Odysseus wants to hear the song without suffering its consequences, so he has his crew stop their ears while they bind him to the mast.
The episode gave us the expression siren song: something powerfully attractive that may lead us somewhere we should not go.
A politician can succumb to the siren song of power. An investor can be seduced by the siren song of easy money. A society can follow the siren song of a seductive but dangerous idea.
The metaphor has survived because Homer's image captures something ordinary language struggles to express: some dangers do not frighten us away. They attract us toward them.
Odysseus knows this. His solution is not to pretend he will be immune to temptation. He arranges beforehand to make surrender impossible.
That may be one reason the Sirens have never stopped speaking to us.
Between Scylla and Charybdis
Not every Homeric expression entered everyday English as a single word.
Odysseus must sail through a narrow passage with Scylla, a many-headed monster, on one side and Charybdis, a deadly whirlpool, on the other. There is no completely safe route.
To be between Scylla and Charybdis therefore came to mean being forced to choose between two dangers.
English has developed other expressions for much the same predicament—“between a rock and a hard place” is the obvious one—but the Homeric version carries an additional suggestion. Sometimes wisdom does not consist of finding the perfect solution. There isn't one.
Odysseus has to choose the course that will cost him less.
It is a disturbingly durable metaphor for political decisions, military strategy and ordinary life.
Lotus-Eaters: The Temptation to Forget
The Lotus-Eaters offer another kind of danger.
When some of Odysseus's men eat the lotus, they lose their desire to return home. They do not become violent or openly rebellious. They simply cease to care about continuing the journey.
Odysseus has to force them back aboard the ships.
From that episode came lotus-eater, a term applied to someone living in dreamy, idle contentment, detached from practical concerns or ambition.
What makes the episode so memorable is that the threat is not suffering. It is pleasure.
The men can abandon the hardship of the voyage. All they have to surrender is the desire to get home.
The Lotus-Eaters therefore belong beside the Sirens as one of Homer's enduring images of temptation—but the temptations are different. The Sirens lure travelers toward destruction. The lotus invites them simply to stop wanting anything else.
Penelope's Web: Work That Is Never Finished
Odysseus is not the only member of his household whose actions became proverbial.
During his long absence, Penelope is besieged by suitors who want her to accept that Odysseus is dead and marry again. She tells them she will choose a husband after she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's father, Laertes.
By day she weaves. At night she secretly unravels what she has woven.
For centuries, Penelope's web or Penelope's work could therefore signify a task endlessly undertaken and undone, or a strategy for postponing an unwanted conclusion.
The expression is less common in everyday English now than mentor or siren song, but the image remains instantly understandable once the story is known: progress by daylight, erasure by night, and completion always just beyond reach.
It also reminds us that cleverness in The Odyssey does not belong to Odysseus alone. Penelope survives through patience, language, concealment and strategy—the very qualities for which her husband is famous.
Nobody: Odysseus Wins with a Word
One of the most famous pieces of language in The Odyssey did not give English a new word at all.
It gave us a joke.
Trapped in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus, Odysseus tells the monster that his name is Nobody—Outis in Greek.
After Odysseus blinds him, the wounded Polyphemus cries out to the other Cyclopes. When they ask who is attacking him, his answer amounts to: Nobody.
So they leave him alone.
It is one of literature's oldest surviving examples of a hero defeating brute strength through verbal ingenuity. Odysseus cannot overpower the Cyclops. He manipulates language instead.
The episode matters because this kind of intelligence is central to Odysseus. He is not merely a warrior returning from Troy. He is a speaker, storyteller, liar, strategist and improviser.
Words are among his most effective weapons.
Nostos: The Word Behind the Journey Home
One important word from the world of The Odyssey did not enter ordinary English unchanged: nostos.
The Greek word means a return or homecoming, and the returns of the Greek heroes after the Trojan War formed an important tradition in ancient literature. Odysseus's is the most celebrated of them: ten years of wandering driven ultimately by the desire to reach Ithaca again.
Centuries later, nostos helped produce a word we use constantly: nostalgia.
But there is an important distinction. Homer did not use our modern word nostalgia, nor did English inherit it directly from The Odyssey. The word was coined much later, in the seventeenth century, from the Greek nostos, “homecoming,” and algos, “pain.” It originally described acute homesickness.
The connection to The Odyssey is nevertheless striking.
Odysseus's great desire is not conquest. He has already survived the war that made him famous. What he wants for most of the poem is something much simpler: to go home.
The word nostalgia was invented thousands of years after Homer, but the feeling contained within its Greek roots could hardly find a more powerful literary embodiment than Odysseus longing for Ithaca.
The Words Outlive the Story
There are many ways for a work of literature to survive.
It can remain on reading lists. It can be translated again and again. It can inspire paintings, novels, plays and films. Its characters can be reinvented by later generations.
But there is another, quieter kind of survival.
A story can become so deeply embedded in a culture that people begin using pieces of it without remembering where they came from.
We still look for mentors. We still embark on odysseys. We still hear siren songs. We still find ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis. We can become lotus-eaters, and we still understand the frustration of work that resembles Penelope's web.
Behind those words and expressions lies an ancient poem about wandering, temptation, intelligence, loss and the longing for home.
You do not have to know Homer to use them.
But once you do know Homer, you begin to hear him everywhere.
More from the Reference Library
You may also be interested in…
Introduction to Ancient Greece
A concise guide to the geography, history, political life, and cultural development of ancient Greece, from the Bronze Age civilizations of Crete and Mycenae through the rise of the city-states, Classical Athens and Sparta, and the age of Alexander the Great.
Read resource →The Enduring Odyssey
Why Odysseus Still Matters 3,000 Years Later
For nearly three thousand years, Odysseus has remained one of literature’s most compelling heroes. His intelligence, pride, failures, endurance, and longing for home still raise questions that feel remarkably familiar: what makes a hero, what does hardship do to us, and what does it really mean to find our way home?
Read resource →