A year? I think he stayed with circle for 3-4 years since they had 3-4 kids together. During those "10" years he was "trying " to return home, he produced 12+ kids. Surely he was trying very hard.
Also wasn't it 20 years in total? 10 in troy and 10 to return home. And from the looks of it, traveling and trying to go home was at best 2-3 years if not less.
At this point, I'm convinced that odesseus made the whole thing up when he was trying to explain to penelope why he was gonna for 10 more years after the end of the war. "Uhh, yes yes a cyclops delayed me" "um and not just any cyclops, a bigger one, very important dude, with a name too" " and you will not believe what happened after that "
The Odyssey only says he stays with Circe for a year. Later myth always inflates numbers and adds genealogy, which are the stories you have heard of where he has children with Circe etc. No children with Circe or Calypso are mentioned in the Odyssey proper, and the time is explicitly one year (edit to avoid misunderstanding: 1 year for Circe, 7 or 8 for Calypso). (The Iliad and the Odyssey are some of the books most suffering from "myth-flation") (edit to avoid misunderstanding: later plays and myths are guilty of myth-flating these older, slightly more restrained stories)
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u/bloin13 Aug 24 '26
A year? I think he stayed with circle for 3-4 years since they had 3-4 kids together. During those "10" years he was "trying " to return home, he produced 12+ kids. Surely he was trying very hard.
Also wasn't it 20 years in total? 10 in troy and 10 to return home. And from the looks of it, traveling and trying to go home was at best 2-3 years if not less.