Odyssey 1.1 · Book 1, lines 1–2
Invocation — the man of many turns
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ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν·
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who wandered far and wide after he sacked Troy's sacred citadel.
Word by word
The setting
The opening of the Odyssey. The poet does not begin with a name but with a type — a man — and asks the Muse to tell of him. The whole poem is folded into these first lines: wandering, the sack of Troy already behind him, and the long way home still ahead.
A note on this passage
The poem opens on a withheld name. Not “Odysseus” but “the man” — and then the one word that fixes him, polútropos, “of many turns.” It faces two ways at once: a man turned about by the world (driven, blown off course) and a man of many turns of mind (shifty, resourceful, hard to pin down). The Muse is asked to sort him out.
The undercurrent is in what the sentence already knows. Troy is over — the great war epic is behind us in a single clause — and what remains is the wandering. The Odyssey announces itself as the poem of after: not the sack, but the long, turning way home from it.
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