Demodocus appears in Odyssey books 8 and briefly around the departure scenes. Homer says the Muse loved him and gave him sweet song while taking his eyes: he is led in and seated at the feast Alcinous holds for the stranger who is Odysseus.

He is the poem's fullest portrait of a professional aoidos — honoured, paid with portions of the feast, and treated as a public voice of memory rather than a private entertainer only.

His first lay tells of a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at a feast of the gods' will — a Trojan episode outside the Iliad's main action. Later, at games and again indoors, he sings of Hephaestus trapping Ares and Aphrodite in an invisible net, and of the Wooden Horse and the sack of Troy.

Odysseus weeps into his cloak at the Trojan songs; the Phaeacians do not yet know who he is. Alcinous notices and stops the bard so that the guest may finally declare himself, opening Odysseus' long first-person narrative.

Ancient and modern readers have taken Demodocus as a figure for the epic poet himself — blindness, Muse, and Trojan repertoire echoing traditions about Homer. He remains a literary character of the Odyssey, not a cult hero with an independent myth cycle outside that poem.