Odysseus (Ὀδυσσεύς)

Role in the Epic

Odysseus is the central figure of the Odyssey — the anēr or "man" of the famous opening invocation. Where the Iliad centers on the rage of Achilles, the most straightforwardly heroic of the Achaean warriors, the Odyssey centers on the most complex: the man of many turns, whose distinguishing virtue is not brute strength or battlefield fury but mētis — craft, intelligence, strategic deception. He is the last of the Achaean kings to return from Troy; his journey home, which occupies the entire poem, lasts ten years to match the ten years of the war. The Odyssey is his nostos: his homecoming.

He appears in every book of the Odyssey either in person or through the accounts of others, though he does not appear on stage in his own voice until Book 5 and does not speak at length until the Phaeacian Apologoi of Books 9–12. This deliberate absence is one of the poem's most characteristic techniques: before we meet Odysseus the man, we meet the idea of Odysseus as he exists in the minds of others — Telemachus' absent father, Penelope's ghost of a husband, Athena's protégé, the suitors' convenient fiction.

Epithets

Homer marks Odysseus with a rich palette of traditional epithets that accumulate into a portrait. The most famous is the one that opens the poem: polytropos (πολύτροπος) — literally "of many turns." It can mean versatile, versatile in cunning, many-sided, or simply much-traveled. Every English translator struggles with it: "man of twists and turns" (Fagles), "the man of many ways" (Fitzgerald), "the various man" (Chapman). Its ambiguity is part of its meaning: Odysseus is a man who has been turned and shaped by his journey, and a man who turns and twists in order to survive it.

Other characteristic epithets:

• Laertiades — "son of Laertes," a patronymic that repeatedly anchors Odysseus to his lineage and his mortal father.
• Great-hearted (megalētōr) — the standard Homeric epithet for the inner greatness of spirit that underlies his outward craft.
• Enduring (talasiphronos) — "long-suffering in heart," the virtue that most distinguishes his second half of the poem.
• City-sacker (ptolioporchos) — a reminder that before he was a wanderer he was a destroyer of Troy, and that the violence of the war will echo in the violence of his return.

Character Traits

Cunning: Mētis over Bia

Odysseus is defined above all by his intelligence. Where Achilles wins through brute force (bia), Odysseus wins through stratagem, trickery, and disguise. He is the man who thought of the Trojan Horse — the trick that won a war ten years of siege could not. He is the man who tells the Cyclops his name is "Nobody" and thus escapes vengeance. He is the man who strings his own bow while disguised as a beggar and shoots an arrow through twelve axe-heads. For Homer, this is not mere cleverness but a distinct and fully legitimate heroic virtue — the virtue appropriate to a world where the straightforward courage of the Iliad is no longer enough to bring a man home.

Yet the poem is ambivalent about Odysseus' cunning. His mētis shades easily into deception, cruelty, and ruthless self-preservation. He lies effortlessly and repeatedly, even to those who love him; he tests Penelope's loyalty long after it has been proven; he hangs twelve disloyal servant girls with what strikes many readers as brutal, unheroic relish. The Odyssey never resolves this ambivalence. It simply presents it as the price of being polytropos — of being a man of many turns.

Endurance and the Long Suffering

No hero in Greek literature suffers as long or as deliberately as Odysseus. Ten years of war; ten years of wandering; seven on Calypso's island, weeping on the shore every day; three days adrift on the open sea clinging to a raft's keel; the humiliation of entering his own palace as a ragged beggar; the blows, insults, and flying footstools of the suitors. The poem tests him to destruction and then tests him further. This endurance is not passivity; it is active, intentional, strategic. Odysseus chooses to suffer because he understands that the path home passes through suffering — and that any shortcut through pride or anger is a detour into death.

Curiosity vs. Recklessness

Odysseus is a man of insatiable curiosity. He stops at the island of the Cyclops because he "wanted to see the man" — not because he needs supplies, not because he is driven off course, but out of sheer idle wonder. He hears the Sirens' song because he wants to hear it, ordering his men to tie him to the mast so that he can experience the forbidden sound without perishing. This curiosity is the source of both his greatest adventures and his greatest disasters. It is what makes him fascinating to the poem's audience, and what makes him, again and again, a danger to the men under his command. Every single member of his crew dies during the voyage home. Odysseus returns alone.

His Relationship with Athena

Odysseus and Athena are the most memorable pair in the Odyssey. The goddess of wisdom, craft, and strategic war has singled Odysseus out for her favor — not because he is the strongest or the bravest of the Achaeans, but because he is the one most like her. "We two," she tells him in Book 13, in one of the poem's most famous exchanges, "we two know how to spin our tricks. For among all mortal men you are far the best in counsel and in storytelling, while among the gods I am famed for my wisdom and my shifts." Theirs is a meeting of kindred spirits.

Athena aids Odysseus at every turn: she persuades Zeus to free him from Calypso, she stills Poseidon's waves, she transforms him into the beggar, she inspires the suitors' mad behavior in the palace, she stands beside him in the final battle. But her aid is never passive rescue. She gives Odysseus the tools and the occasions to save himself; she tests him, provokes him, pushes him further, delights in the intricate interplay of their two cunning minds. The Odyssey's deepest theological vision may lie here: the gods favor those who are, in their own way, most like the gods.