Coming home, he finds that his palace is being occupied by men trying to marry his supposedly widowed wife Penelope?. Penelope does not believe he is dead, and doesn't want to remarry: she has put the suitors off by insisting that she must first weave her husband a burial shroud, and every night she undoes that day's weaving. After posing for a while as a beggar, Odysseus reveals himself and kills them all.
In the English language, the word odyssey has come to refer to such epic voyages.
A modern book inspired by the Odyssey is James Joyce's Ulysses? (1922).
The movie O Brother, Where Art Thou has the basic plot of the Odyssey, and was probably inspired by it.
R. A. Lafferty? retold the story in a science fiction setting in his novel [Space Chantey]?.