Odysseus spends ten years trying to return home from Troy, encountering Cyclopes, sirens, gods, and the hospitality of strangers. Homer composed this after the Iliad, and it is the gentler epic: a poem of homecoming rather than war, of cleverness rather than strength. Penelope waiting, Telemachus searching, Odysseus enduring: the structure is elaborate, the poetry formulaic in the technical sense, meaning it was built for oral performance and memory. Every journey home since has been measured against this one. The poem ends with reunion, with recognition, with the bed that cannot be moved.