Where the Iliad deals with one short phase of the Trojan War, the Odyssey tells the drawn-out story of the Achaean hero Odysseus after the sack of Troy: his enforced wanderings, his return to his homeland Ithaca, his struggle to regain his kingdom and Penelope, his queen, who has spent the best part of twenty years resisting the advances of the local princes.

The Odyssey has long been regarded as a poem like, but not like, the Iliad. For 'Longinus', in the first century ad, the poem is 'an epilogue' to the Trojan epic, and in support of this proposition the critic cites old Nestor’s recollections of the Trojan battlefield, as told to Odysseus' son Telemachus in Book iii:

The Iliad celebrates a ritualised way of living and dying and, complementary to it, practises a ritualised way of describing that living and dying – which is the aesthetic rationale of its formulaic alternations and repetitions. It celebrates also a human striving for heroism and an agreed, if elusive, harmony of human striving and divine facilitation. The Odyssey is different. Though its formulaic idiom, its ritualism and its heroic ideal are similar, the Odyssean universe, by comparison, seems restless and less assured of any ultimate correspondence than concerned to achieve one. Even before the action of the poem is under way, the Odyssey foregrounds the issue of disharmony of the spheres.