Homer's Odyssey follows Odysseus, king of Ithaca, on his ten-year journey home from the Trojan War. This family tree maps his whole house: his parents Laertes and Anticlea; his devoted wife Penelope, who held off 108 suitors for twenty years by weaving and secretly unravelling a burial shroud; their son Telemachus, an infant when his father sailed for Troy; and his sister Ctimene, married to Eurylochus — the same second-in-command who defied Odysseus at sea.
The tree runs deeper than the household. Odysseus's grandfather was Autolycus, a master thief said to be a son of Hermes, who named the boy and hosted the boar hunt that gave him his identifying scar. And Penelope's side makes the poem's great comparison literal: her father Icarius was brother to King Tyndareus of Sparta, so Helen of Troy — whose flight started the war — and Clytemnestra — who murdered her returning husband Agamemnon — were Penelope's own first cousins. The faithful wife, the runaway, and the killer sit on neighboring branches.
Odysseus's long wandering entangled him with two immortal women — the enchantress Circe of Aeaea, mother of his son Telegonus, and the nymph Calypso, who held him seven years and offered immortality. The later epic tradition (the Telegony) gives the family its strangest coda: Telegonus, raised far from Ithaca, unknowingly kills his father — then marries the widowed Penelope, while Telemachus marries Circe. Each son weds the other's mother, and the genogram draws both edges.
Odysseus may be the most “real” of Homer's heroes. On Ithaca itself, at a rugged site long known as the “School of Homer,” archaeologists from the University of Ioannina have uncovered a sanctuary where he was venerated for over a thousand years: roof tiles inscribed “of Odysseus,” a Roman-era bronze bust of the hero, and more than a hundred coins left by pilgrims from across the ancient world. The finds don't prove a literal king who blinded a Cyclops — but they show that Greeks and Romans treated Ithaca as sacred ground and came, for generations, to honor the king who sailed home.
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