Which war has just ended before Odysseus begins his voyage home?

The Trojan War has just ended before Odysseus begins his voyage home in The Odyssey.

The poem opens after the Achaean Greeks have captured and destroyed Troy. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, is among the victorious Greek leaders, but he has not yet reached home. His return journey will take another ten years, as storms, monsters, hostile gods, and enchanted islands repeatedly delay him.

The Trojan War itself is the central conflict of Homer’s Iliad, while The Odyssey focuses on its aftermath: Odysseus’s nostos, or homecoming. A common mix-up is to treat the Odyssey as an account of the war’s battles. Instead, its opening assumes the war is over and explores what happens to its survivors. Telemachus’s first four books also establish the war’s consequences for Odysseus’s family in Ithaca.