After the Odyssey Ends
Homer leaves Odysseus at peace in Ithaca, with a prophecy of a gentle death in old age. Later storytellers were not satisfied. They pushed him back to sea, tangled his family tree, and devised new, often grim endings.
The lost epic Telegony, surviving only in fragments and reports, sends him to the land of the Thesprotians. There he marries their queen Callidice, leads them to victory in war, and leaves their son Polypoetes as king.
Killed by His Own Blood
The Telegony offers a startling death. Telegonus, Odysseus’s son by Circe, sails in search of his father and raids Ithaca unknowingly. In the clash, he strikes an old man with a spear tipped with a stingray spine—an odd, sinister weapon given by his mother.
The victim is Odysseus. Only as he dies do father and son recognize each other.
Telegonus then returns to Circe’s island with Odysseus’s body, Penelope, and Telemachus. Circe buries the hero and makes the survivors immortal. In an unsettling reshuffling, she marries Telemachus, and Penelope marries Telegonus, on Athena’s advice.
Even Stranger Endings
Other versions grow more fantastical. One lost tragedy, inspired by Odysseus’s visit to the dead, reportedly had Tiresias foretell a freak death: droppings from a heron, carrying a stingray barb, would land on the hero’s bald head and rot his flesh.
Later tradition claims Circe resurrected Odysseus after Telegonus killed him. He then lived to see Telemachus murder Circe in a quarrel and Circe’s daughter Cassiphone kill Telemachus in revenge. Overwhelmed by grief, Odysseus died a second time.
A Life That Refuses to Finish
These late tales may contradict Homer, but they reveal how hard it was for the ancient imagination to let Odysseus rest. He is too restless, too complicated, to accept a quiet end. Instead, he drifts on into lost epics and fragmentary tragedies, his story always liable to one more twist.