The Odyssey.
It is the ultimate adventure story.
A warrior king in a desperate race to get home
before he loses the woman he loves
and the nation he rules.
In his way are savage beasts,
hurricane winds, giant cannibals,
and he'll have to outsmart them all.
Modern research is revealing some surprising truths behind this epic myth.
This the real story of Odysseus.
Ten terrified sailors are trapped
inside the lair of a one-eyed man-eating cyclops.
Two of their companions have been devoured before their eyes.
Each fears he will be the next to die.
The men need a miracle.
And they look desperately to their leader to deliver one.
His name is Odysseus.
Odysseus never stops thinking, he never lets go,
he refuses to believe that anything can defeat him,
that's a fundamental part of his character.
He's the sneaky guy who'll do what it takes to beat you.
Odysseus is a thinking man's hero.
A leader who relies on his intellect rather than his strength.
And he will need all of his uncommon wit to escape the cyclops alive.
The cool thing about Odysseus is that, unlike other heroes,
Odysseus is thoroughly mortal.
He is man.
We connect with him in a special way because of that.
There was a popularity he had among the ancients because of that.
The story of Odysseus, called the Odyssey,
was written by a Greek poet named Homer in the 8th century BC.
The story of the Odyssey, I think, we can all embrace
because it's about a person faced with a lot of frustrations and obstacles.
Odysseus' journey home from war is a timeless tale of perseverance.
It is also a story that symbolises the dawn of a new era in ancient Greece.
I think the Odyssey, in a way, is a bit like a James Bond novel.
If you think about what Ian Fleming wrote,
he always put his hero into real-life places.
I think that's what Homer was doing.
In a time when Greek sailors
were exploring far-off lands across the Mediterranean,
Odysseus represented the modern adventurer.
There are a lot of stories that are reflected in the Odyssey
of this expansion of the Greeks,
where the Greeks are beginning to colonize and reports are coming back
about various monsters, or various things... sailor tales.
The story of Odysseus begins on Ithaca,
the mythical Greek island he rules.
He was a happy and successful king.
He had a wife whom he was very fond of, she was very fond of him,
they had a young son.
In the myth, Ithaca is an oasis of peace
surrounded by a sea of enemies.
Sparta and Troy, the regional superpowers,
have been bitter rivals for years.
Now a sexual affair involving the most beautiful woman on Earth
will bring them to war.
Helen, the Queen of Sparta, has run off with the Prince of Troy.
Sparta pressures Ithaca to join the fight to bring her back home.
Bound by honour, Odysseus enlists.
He heads off to battle knowing that this may be the last time
he ever sees his family or his kingdom.
Odysseus leads a fleet of twelve ships to Troy
where he soon finds himself on the front lines of war.
The battle for Helen rages for a decade
until the Greek forces hit a wall...
literally.
The wall around Troy is so massive, so impenetrable,
the Greeks believe it was built by gods.
In antiquity people thought it had been built
by some kind of divine intervention on behalf of the Trojans.
With a war on the line, Odysseus devises an ingenious strategy
to get inside the wall.
He says, "We should build a hollow wooden horse
"which we will leave on the beach.
"We will pretend that we've given up,
"that we've decided the Trojans are too much for us and we've gone home. "
"Inside the horse is going to be our best heroes,
"myself included," Odysseus of course,
"and the Trojans are gonna drag this horse inside
"because they're gonna think it's a parting gift for the gods. "
When dawn breaks, the Trojans are stunned.
The Greeks are gone and there is a gigantic horse outside their walls.
So goes the myth,
but what is the link to reality?
Scholars long believed Troy was an imaginary city,
and the Trojan War only a legend.
But in the late 19th century,
a five-acre field in Western Turkey yielded something startling.
An ancient city with a massive wall.
And the remains of a large palace.
Two key features of Homer's Troy.
The structures had been burned just like the mythical city.
The site is close to the coast
in the region where experts believe Troy would have been.
And its terrain is similar to the landscape Homer describes.
But there's more.
Among the ruins archaeologists found evidence of war.
We have found a number of arrowheads and spearheads at Troy.
We've also found an unburied skeleton inside the city of Troy.
That's a dead giveaway usually of a war because ancient people
had a horror of leaving bodies unburied within the city walls.
They wouldn't do so unless they were
in very extreme circumstances.
Did the Trojan War really happen?
Is there also some truth behind the story of Odysseus?
Our search for clues leads back to the myth.
Odysseus and his men are huddled inside the wooden horse
as it rolls through the gates and into Troy.
The Trojans have mistaken it for a peace offering.
The horse was a symbol of Troy.
The Trojans are known as great horse breeders.
The countryside outside Troy was to ancient horse breeding
what Kentucky is to modern horse breeding.
So by leaving a Trojan horse
it seemed as if this was an homage to the Trojans,
a symbol of what Troy was all about.
The Trojans fall for the stratagem,
they celebrate because the war's over,
at the end of a long party much wine and much eating has been done,
everybody is basically passed out in the city of Troy.
As the Trojans sleep,
Odysseus and his elite forces emerge from the horse.
There's a wonderful description in our sources
of the Trojans lying innocently,
sleeping, dreaming, relaxing,
and the Greeks going through the city like a mist,
creeping through the dark alleyways.
In the dead of night, the Greeks strike.
The Trojans are caught off guard
and the city of Troy burns.
Odysseus' unusual strategy has succeeded.
His Trojan horse has won the war
and he emerges as the hero of the day.
Many of the heroes from that period in Greek history and mythology
were celebrated because they were great warriors,
they were very strong, good with the bow...
Odysseus was different.
He was a hero who was celebrated
because he was crafty, he was intelligent.
Odysseus is at his best when he's under pressure.
He, any number of times, gets into places
where no human being should be able to escape.
He faces certain death at all kinds of different turns,
and he always seems to find a way through.
He's like an ancient MacGyver.
Odysseus has survived 10 years
on the front lines of a brutal conflict.
He is anxious to get home to Ithaca.
But the Trojan War was nothing compared with what still lies ahead.
A menagerie of monsters,
and mayhem.
The Odyssey is just beginning.
In Homer's Odyssey, the Trojan was has ended.
Now the journey home begins.
Odysseus' island of Ithaca is 565 nautical miles from Troy.
In ancient times, that was a journey of a few weeks.
When Odysseus left Troy he wanted to get home
but I don't think in any way he's expecting
that it's gonna take him 10 years to get home.
I think he thought that he might stop along the way
to go on some raids, maybe to show off some of his success.
In a matter of a month or two
he had every reason to think he would be home in Ithaca.
Odysseus sets out for Ithaca with a fleet of 12 ships
and a crew of 600 war-weary sailors.
It is an impressive fleet by ancient standards,
but could it have been real?
1988,
two scuba divers stumble upon an unusual shipwreck
off the coast of Southern Sicily.
The ship stretches nearly 60 feet long, and 22 feet wide,
making it the biggest ancient vessel of its kind ever discovered.
But exactly how old is it?
To find out, scientists analyse
the tree rings in wooden planks recovered by the divers.
The results are stunning.
The ship dates back to approximately 500 BC,
within two centuries of the Odyssey.
It's an exciting revelation.
This could be exactly the type of ship
Homer imagined for Odysseus.
2008, the entire ship is finally pulled from the Mediterranean Sea
and dried up in Portsmouth, England,
to be studied piece by piece.
Here experts are able to compare the remains with Homer's description
of how Odysseus' ships were built.
The result...
it's a perfect match.
The interesting thing about this ship, as opposed to North European ships,
is that it was made with mortise-and-tenon
and it was held together with rope.
This is the same method of ship building described in the Odyssey.
Now, after two and a half millennia, at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea,
this ship is giving scholars an unprecedented glimpse
into the world of Odysseus.
This is not a primitive vessel.
This is quite a sophisticated piece of technology.
Odysseus' journey could well have taken place.
And what's exciting about this is that we've got
a ship that could well have been
comparable to the ships that he would have been on.
The myth continues.
Odysseus is headed for home at last.
His faithful wife Penelope, and his now 10 year-old son Telemachus,
are eagerly awaiting his return.
But in his absence, his palace has been overrun by lecherous men
who are out to steal his wife and his throne.
Odysseus has been gone a while.
Penelope of course is faithful but she's surrounded by suitors
and they want to marry Penelope.
And in marrying Penelope, of course,
they want to have the power that goes with it
and take over Odysseus' dominion.
So it's not a good situation.
If Odysseus doesn't make it home soon
all that he fought for will be lost.
Odysseus' first stop after leaving Troy
is the coastal city of Ismarus.
There he will seek vengeance against an old enemy.
These were a group of people who had been allied with the Trojans,
they'd helped the Trojans against the Greeks,
and Odysseus wants to now exact revenge on him.
Ismarus may have been one of the settings in the Odyssey
that was based on a real location.
In ancient times it was said to be home
to the fiercest warriors in the known world.
They're absolutely terrific fighters
and their particular specialty was unconventional warfare.
Great guerrillas and insurgents of the ancient world.
But that doesn't deter Odysseus.
In the myth, he and his men come ashore braced for battle.
They clobber the city, steal all the treasure,
and they're on their way home.
Of course, they make a mistake.
They drink a little too much, they eat a little too much,
and they pass out on the beach.
Their victory party is premature.
Early the next morning
the natives ambush the men while they sleep.
Within minutes, 72 sailors are massacred.
The rest barely make it out alive.
It is a hard lesson about underestimating the enemy.
And the first in a series of deadly mistakes by Odysseus and his crew.
He does get away with the better part of his force but he loses a lot
and learns a very painful lesson
about keeping everybody on their toes at all times.
This is going to be a very dangerous journey.
There is a theme in Homer that we might simply describe
as "always be prepared, never let your guard down. "
Again and again we see people who have a little taste of victory
and they immediately party.
And their enemy is leaner and meaner
and hunger for victory, takes advantage of it.
It is a cycle we see again and again in the history of ancient,
and we might say in the history of modern, warfare as well.
Odysseus and his men are shell-shocked.
They stay at sea for the next two weeks.
But not by choice.
The fleet encounters another devastating obstacle.
A hurricane.
The storm blows them off the map and from here
until the very end of his adventures
Odysseus is kind of in Never-Neverland.
The hurricane carries the fleet all the way to North Africa.
There, on an exotic island just off the coast,
Odysseus and his men unwittingly step into a mythological drug den.
The natives here warmly welcome them with an offering of lotus,
a sweet-tasting flower with mind-altering properties.
Odysseus is suspicious and he's right to be weary in the situation
because what happens when his men eat the lotus is that
is a kind of drug and they become very happy and forgetful
of what they're trying to do, which is to get home.
They want to stay in the land of the lotus eaters forever.
Some experts think the lotus-eaters were meant to symbolise
a real scourge of ancient Greece: drug abuse.
Greeks knew the poppy.
There are many Mycenaean seals and objects
in which you clearly see the poppy, so they knew about opium,
and therefore hashish.
The point being, human beings like intoxication.
Within the Odyssey, its function is to show
how people can get lost on their way home.
And that's very human.
Once again, the crew has been sidetracked by self-indulgence.
It will become a running theme throughout the Odyssey.
But their leader, Odysseus, stays sober.
He has just one goal -
to return home to Ithaca where his wife and son are waiting.
He just says, "Come on! Come on, you knuckleheads.
"Let's get back in the boat. " And off they go.
It's this incredibly short episode and yet it's been written about so much,
and I think the reason is because everybody knows that experience.
Everybody is tired. Everybody's been through too much.
What could be more attractive that to eat, drink, smoke,
ingest something that will just let you forget.
The journey home has begun again
but the crew's curiosity may yet be its death.
When the fleet comes across another island teeming with wild game
it seems like a dream come true.
But it's about to become hell on earth.
Odysseus and his men have stumbled upon the land
of a giant man-eating cyclops,
and it's almost dinner time.
The mythical hero Odysseus is trying to get back to his wife and son
after a decade at war.
But this is not the trip home he envisioned.
After several weeks at sea
he has lost 72 of his men in an ambush
and confronted hurricane winds that pushed him far off-course.
Now, an unknown island offers a chance
to replenish both supplies and morale...
or so it seems.
There are a number of reasons why Odysseus would have to put to shore,
one they'd been out at sea for a while
and you need to put ashore for supplies and provisions.
But the other thing that you have to remember about Odysseus
is he is just fundamentally curious.
Sometimes too curious for his own good.
He wants to know, he is intrigued by knowledge
and so sometimes he pushes it a little bit too far.
And there's such an insight into the Greek character here.
This is a period of vast Greek expansion and colonization.
The Greeks themselves, in Homer's day, wanted to go out into the world
for many solid, economic reasons but also because they were simply curious.
Odysseus selects his 12 best men to explore the island with him.
Just before he sets off, he grabs one last item,
a goat skin full of wine.
It will prove to be a life-saver.
Priority number one for the explorers is to find something to eat.
Just offshore, the men hit the jackpot.
They come across a cave filled with food.
Only one thing is missing, the cave's owner.
When they get into the cave, Odysseus' see wonderful stores of food
and they're ready to steal it and take off and get out of danger.
Odysseus though is very curious.
He wants to stick around.
He thinks that the person that lives there should owe him a gift.
And this is traditional in ancient Greek society.
That a person who arrives as a stranger on someone else's shores
is owed a gift.
When a stranger shows up in your town you take him in,
you give him a place to rest, you give him food,
you treat him kindly.
Inside the cave, Odysseus and his men help themselves to a long awaited feast.
As the Sun sets, the man of the house finally returns,
but he is not what the sailors were expecting.
He is a giant cyclops.
A ravenous beast with the strength of 20 men
and one massive eye in the middle of his face.
The sight of him sends Odysseus and his men cowering into a dark corner.
The cyclops lights his nightly fire and the men are exposed.
When the cyclops arrives home
he sees that these men have come in to steal his food.
He is angry. And then Odysseus steps up and kind of beats his chest
and says, "Hello, we've just arrived from faraway lands. Where's our gift?"
And he's being a little bit rude too.
So you can kind of see how the cyclops is a little bit miffed.
This has all just gone terribly wrong.
In the blink of an eye the cyclops lunges forward,
grabs two of the sailors and devours them.
He leaves not a morsel behind.
Not even the bones.
When the Greeks see the cyclops eat two of their fellow Greeks
they're shocked, they're frightened.
Cannibalism in ancient Greece was an incredibly barbarous act.
For them a mark of a civilised person
was actually the way they ate and drank.
The men are terrified, they're also frustrated with Odysseus
for leading them into this ungodly mess
and they decide, "Well. While he's asleep, let's kill him. "
But Odysseus, fortunately, is the smartest guy in the bunch,
and he says, "We can't kill him. "
Odysseus has a problem,
if the sailors, if Odysseus, kill the cyclops now
they'll be trapped within the cave
because they're not strong enough to move the stone on their own.
On the other hand, if the men don't kill the cyclops
they will surely die.
It is a hopeless situation.
But Odysseus has overcome too much to give up now.
If he can't use his strength to beat this monster,
he'll use his intelligence.
He never gives up hope, even though his men in the cyclops' cave
feel it's over, Odysseus is always scheming, planning, thinking.
The giant cyclops is one of mythology's most memorable monsters.
But could it be more than just a figment of Homer's imagination?
Today some experts think it was inspired by a real life beast,
and this may be the proof.
The mythical hero Odysseus and his men are facing all but certain death
inside the cave of a monstrous cyclops.
Two have already been eaten
and the beast is hungry for more.
At sunrise the cyclops devours two more men.
Then he heads out to graze his sheep sealing the cave behind him.
Time is running out for Odysseus.
The mastermind of the Trojan horse
desperately needs a new stroke of genius...
and fast.
Odysseus is someone who survives on his wits,
but what makes Odysseus different than all of the other mythic characters
is that he thinks before he acts.
He's likely to come up with a cunning solution rather than a direct one.
So goes the myth, but what is the link to reality?
The giant cyclops seems like the work of a disturbed imagination
but it may be based on actual science.
There are three very different facts of ancient life
that could have inspired Homer's monster.
The first is a rare disease that causes foetuses to develop only one large eye.
It's a condition called cyclopia.
And it may have been widely known to the ancient Greeks.
Exposure to certain sorts of alkaloid toxins that are found in some herbs
can cause pregnant women to deliver children that have cyclopia.
This is very interesting because some of those herbs that happen to
have these dangerous compounds happen to be ones
that ancient Greek medical men prescribed to their patients.
Cyclopia results when these toxins
prevent the brain from developing properly.
As a result, instead of having two separate eye sockets
you get one big one.
You have a cyclops birth.
And this could have served as a kind of inspiration for legends
about these one-eyed creatures that roamed the earth.
But it's also possible that Homer's cyclops
was inspired by something much bigger...
a volcano.
In the myth, Odysseus describes the cyclops as a man-mountain
rearing head and shoulders over the world.
It's very possible that the ancient Greeks,
looking at erupting volcanoes like Mount Etna,
might have looked at that huge angry red eye of the volcano
as it erupted hot rocks and lava,
and they might have pictured a sort of monstrous man-mountain
with a single eye that was angrily raging at mankind.
But there is one more potential real world inspiration for the cyclops,
fossils dug up by ancient archaeologists.
The ancient Greeks were all extremely interested in the natural world
and they collected lots of specimens of everything.
And of course they did find samples of fossils out in the wild as well.
Now, if you look at the skull of an elephant,
it's a pretty impressive thing because there is a huge opening
right in the middle of the forehead.
The actual eye openings look relatively small in comparison
and are shunted off to the side.
So if you didn't know what it was, you might very easily imagine
that this was the skull of some sort of gigantic one-eyed creature.
The Odyssey continues.
Odysseus and his men are hostages in the cave of the cyclops.
Unless something changes fast they will all be eaten.
But Odysseus remains focused.
There's a Greek fear that surrounds the entire episode,
and the men around him tend to fall apart under this fear,
Odysseus never does.
He realises, in a very cold, calculating, rational way,
that these emotions will only get in the way,
and will only get in the way of his escape and his solution to the problem.
He focuses always on the problem and only on the problem.
While the cyclops is out tending his sheep,
Odysseus spots the massive wooden club he left behind,
and gets an idea.
With the help of his men he shaves the narrow end to a fine point,
hardens it over a flame, and waits.
As night falls, the cyclops returns.
He snatches two more sailors and eats them alive.
As the dust settles,
Odysseus steps forward with the wine he brought from his ship.
He offers it to the cyclops.
The beast downs one bowl,
then another,
and a third.
Instantly, he begins to teeter.
Some people might think, when they hear that the cyclops has
a couple of glasses of wine and then passes out on the floor,
that he must have been a real light weight,
he didn't have any tolerance for alcohol.
The truth is that ancient wine was a lot stronger and harsher
than wine is today.
In antiquity there was very strong wine,
we might even call it fortified wine,
that had a very high alcohol content,
and typically what one would do is measure it out
and then dilute it with water to be an appropriate drink at a dinner.
The wine that Odysseus gives to the cyclops
is an entirely undiluted form.
As the drunken giant stumbles around the cave
he asks Odysseus his name and gets a clever answer.
Odysseus says, "Oh! Well, my name is Nobody. "
At that point there's no way that any of us can quite realise
how this will fit into the plan,
but it's been part of Odysseus' plan all along.
With that, the cyclops crashes to the floor and passes out.
Odysseus springs into action.
With the help of his men, he lifts the buried stake,
charges forward, and plunges it into the eye of the beast.
Hearing the screams of the cyclops inside of his cave,
the other cyclopses come around
and ask him, "What's going on inside of there?
"We hear you scream. Something horrible must be happening. "
The cyclops at that point then answers, "Nobody is hurting me.
"Nobody is harming me. "
And the neighbour cyclopses then scratch their heads and say,
"Well, I guess nobody's hurting him. We might as well get back to bed. "
So this trick that Odysseus has put in place earlier on in the story
by not giving his real name but saying his name was "Nobody",
we now see it comes to fruition.
The wounded cyclops opens the doorway in a blind rage.
Odysseus sees his opening and makes his move.
The cyclops is sitting in front of the door
and Odysseus doesn't let them try to creep out.
He knows the cyclops will get them,
and he doesn't let them ride the sheep out,
'cos he knows he's gonna be clever enough for that.
He ties them beneath the sheep.
As dawn breaks the sheep head out to pasture
with Odysseus and his men clinging to their underbellies.
The cyclops is not entirely a fool.
He knows that the Greeks might be trying to escape from his cave,
but as the sheep pass by he feels each one on top.
But the Greeks are underneath and he doesn't feel them.
Odysseus' escape from the cyclops' cave is the perfect example
of brain over brawl.
That's Jack and the Beans, that's David and Goliath,
it is the sneaky little guy defeating the big, dumb guy.
This much, much bigger obstacles that we face,
this brain of ours can overcome them.
It's this fundamental story that is absolutely core to humanity.
Odysseus is a master of deception.
But he hasn't yet mastered his own pride.
As the ship sails away from the coast
he can't resist revealing his own true identity.
It's a mistake that will haunt him for years to come.
The cyclops is standing there cursing him.
Suddenly Odysseus, almost inexplicably, turns and says,
"You want to know who I am? I am Odysseus, son of Laërtes. "
Now, to us that seems like a really stupid move,
but the most important thing for a Greek hero was
something called "kleos", fame.
So it was your fame, your reputation that really mattered.
So one thing that Odysseus is doing at that moment
is making sure that he gets credit for what happened.
The cyclops is blinded and beaten,
but he has one last hope for revenge...
his powerful father.
It turns out that the cyclops is a son of the sea-god Poseidon.
And he intends to make Odysseus pay with his life.
Mythology's greatest mortal, Odysseus,
has been lost at sea for more than two months.
He's desperate to get home to his kingdom and his family,
but he's not even close.
All the other heroes that are still alive
from the Greek force at Troy have made it home.
Only one is not home yet, and that's Odysseus.
He's literally the last hero on the sea.
From the outset, Odysseus' return voyage has not gone according to plan.
He has come face to face with a lethal army,
and a blood-thirsty cyclops,
and been driven hundreds of miles off-course by hurricane winds.
Threats like this would crush the spirits of most men,
but Odysseus isn't most men.
One of the things that I think makes Odysseus such an appealing character
is that every challenge that comes along
he treats as just an obstacle to be overcome.
Now Odysseus must confront his most terrifying obstacle yet,
the cyclops he just blinded and escaped from
is the son of one of mythology's most powerful gods.
The master of the seas, Poseidon.
The cyclops asks his father, the god Poseidon,
to take vengeance on Odysseus.
To kill him, or if not, to make the rest of his trip a living hell.
By attacking the son of a god,
by attacking the cyclops who's the son of Poseidon,
he makes a double mistake - one is he angers a god,
but the second is he angers the god of the sea.
He's sailing home!
Odysseus now faces two daunting challenges -
survive the wrath of Poseidon,
and get home before another man steals his wife.
As the days and weeks pass, the suitors courting Penelope
grow more and more brazen.
The locals realise that here is
this wonderfully beautiful, capable woman, Penelope, and she's all alone.
She also happens to be sitting atop a store of great wealth
so there are many people who would try to vie for her affections.
But Penelope still clings to the hope that her husband is on his way home.
She still believes that Odysseus is coming home,
and she is willing to do everything in her power
to make sure that his throne is still available for him when he returns.
A few days after surviving the giant cyclops,
Odysseus encounters someone who can help him get home.
On the island of Aeolia,
he meets a king name Aeolus.
King Aeolus has a special power.
He has control over the winds.
He's able to regulate and control which way the winds blow.
King Aeolus secretly gives Odysseus a present,
a bag containing all the winds that could blow him off-course.
As long as that bag remains closed
he'll have smooth sailing all the way back to Ithaca.
This is an enormously important gift for ancient travellers.
It's the equivalent of him giving Odysseus a fleet of jet planes.
The winds are the motive power of ancient shipping,
so this is a very great gift because the winds can bring you home.
For nine days and nights, the Greeks sail straight for Ithaca
aided by favourable winds.
Finally Odysseus is on his way home.
He stays awake the whole way
working his ship round the clock.
On the tenth day Ithaca appears on the horizon.
But in the last mile, fatigue finally overcomes the hero.
As Odysseus dozes, his crew seizes the chance to find out
what's in the mysterious bag.
His men immediately decide "there's gold, there's silver, there's treasures,
"and Odysseus doesn't want to share it with us. "
They want it for themselves,
so curiosity tinged with a bit of greed leads to their undoing.
With the shores of Ithaca in plain sight,
they open the bag
and the Poseidon curse is unleashed with a vengeance.
In seconds, Odysseus' hopes of getting home are destroyed.
The winds immediately drive his fleet back to Aeolia.
But this time he won't get any help from the King.
Odysseus says to Aeolus, "Can you help us again?"
And Aeolus says, "No. You are clearly cursed by the gods.
"It could not have been easier for you to get home, given what I gave you.
"If you didn't get home, some god has it out for you
"and I am not messing with that. "
"Go on your way. "
It's another painful setback for Odysseus,
but he wastes no time worrying about what might have been.
He may be knocked down just as much as all the rest of us,
and even harder than all the rest of us,
but he always can get back up, he can always find a way.
Odysseus' ability to persevere is put to the test again
just days after he leaves Aeolia.
His fleet pulls into a mysterious harbour
and gets attacked out of nowhere by a race of giant cannibals.
In a matter of minutes, Odysseus loses hundreds of men
and all but one of his ships.
The waves run red with blood.
Once again, the Poseidon curse is devastating in its cruelty.
When Odysseus left Troy
he did not think this was going to be an epic journey home.
I don't think he could ever had imagined the kind of journey
and the kind of troubles and adventures that he'd find along the way.
For Odysseus the adventures are just beginning.
The rest of his journey home will present challenges more daunting
than any man has ever faced.
When the story of Odysseus continues
our mortal hero is a marked man.
Poseidon has put a bounty on his head.
Each day his crew and his chances will diminish
until Odysseus finds himself alone.
One man against all odds.
One goal: get home before it's too late.