So you think you know the Odyssey?

I'm guessing most people who've read or think they've read The Odyssey would tell you it begins with Odysseus setting forth on his eponymous sea voyage but that's not so - the Odyssey begins actually toward the end of the story, in medias res or in the middle of the journey, as the phrase goes: it begins years after the fall of Troy at a time when all of the Grecian heroes have returned home except for Odysseus, who is still lost at sea, rumored to be held captive as a slave, by Calypso; as the story begins the gods are meeting, as they seem wont to do - but this meeting is auspicious because Poseidon is absent - the sea god is the cause of the torment of O., because P is angry at O's blinding of his Cyclopean son - and Athena calls for mercy on O.  - she garbs herself as a young man and descends to earth, to Ithaca, where she appears before O's son Telemachus; the court of O. is filled with suitors for his presumably widowed Penelope, and they're all a bunch of opportunistic boors. As T. laments to Athena, whom he does not recognize as a goddess, they're eating up his inheritance. She tells him to go in search of his father, to make inquiries among the other Greek generals, assuring him his father is still alive - then she ascends and T. understands he's had a visitation. Imagine, now, reading all this and not knowing anything of O's voyage - what an incredibly great narrative, what an amazing way to bring us into the story, how could you not want to read (or listen) further? I'm reading the relatively recent Mitchell translation which seems to have an appropriate balance of the colloquial and the sonorous.