Characters
- Cicones of Ismarus — sacked townspeople
- Inland Cicones — stronger neighbors who counterattack at dawn
- Lyssa — named as heaper of successive woes (Odysseus’s framing)
- Odysseus — leads the raid; advises departure; later narrates the loss
- Odysseus’s companions — linger drinking; six per ship slain
Places
- Assembly — point of departure
- Ismarus — Ciconian city in Thrace, first landfall after Troy
- Mysia — region of the Cicones
- Ships — site of the disastrous lingering and retreat
Themes
Narrative
After leaving Troy, Odysseus and his ships first strike the Cicones at Ismarus in Thrace. They sack the city, kill the men, and divide the women and plunder fairly so that no one goes short. Odysseus urges an immediate departure; his men refuse and linger on the shore, drinking wine and slaughtering sheep and cattle by the beach. Meanwhile Cicones inland summon neighbors more numerous and warlike. At dawn the reinforced Cicones attack. The battle holds through the morning; toward afternoon the Achaeans break. Six picked men from each ship die; the rest escape out to sea. Odysseus later invokes this loss when he recounts how Zeus piled woe on woe from the moment they left Troy.
Ismarus is the first failure of nostos discipline: greed and delayed sailing cost comrades before any supernatural trial. Catalogue it separately from the Cyclops episode that follows in the same book.