After years of war and still more years of travelling, Ulysses finally returns to his beloved Ithaca, penniless and alone. Rather than the joyous welcome he had hoped for, he finds his palace full of quarrelling suitors, all scheming to possess his wife and his land. Meanwhile the beautiful Penelope is speculating on why it should take any man seven years to get home. As the couple find their way back to each other, Homer becomes increasingly irritated that they are not adhering to the plot of his new book, and Athena, the Goddess of Reason, has had enough of irrational mortal behaviour.