Odysseus

In the Odyssey

The poem's first word about him is an adjective: polytropos, of many turns. It can mean much-travelled or it can mean devious, and the poem never chooses. His other standing epithets are polymētis, of many counsels, and polytlas, much-enduring. All three describe capacities rather than virtues.

What he does in the poem: he survives. He blinds a Cyclops by a trick of language, resists a witch by a drug given him by a god, refuses immortality, loses every one of his companions, comes home after twenty years, conceals himself in his own house, endures being kicked and struck by men eating his property, kills a hundred and eight of them, and is then tested by his wife and fails to anticipate her test.

He is also a liar of extraordinary fluency. He tells at least four elaborate false life stories in the second half of the poem — to Athena, to Eumaeus, to Penelope, and finally to his own grieving father. Athena, meeting him disguised and being lied to, laughs and praises him for it. The poem does not present this as a flaw to be corrected.

And he weeps: on Calypso's shore daily, at the Phaeacian court when the bard sings about Troy, on being recognised by his son and his servants. The Odyssey's hero cries more than most modern versions of him are willing to show.

In the Iliad

A different and smaller role. He is a counsellor and speaker, the man sent on the embassy to Achilles in Book 9, and one of the two who conduct the night raid of Book 10 — a book widely regarded as a late addition to the poem. He is competent and valued and not central.

The two Homeric portraits are compatible but not identical, and the Odyssey's interest in deception is much more developed.

Other ancient traditions

Ancient opinion divided sharply, and the division is worth keeping in view because modern readers often inherit one side of it without knowing there was another.

The philosophical schools — the Cynics and later the Stoics — made him a model: the man of endurance, self-sufficiency and reason, who resists appetite in the form of the Lotus and the Sirens.

Attic tragedy did close to the opposite. Sophocles' Philoctetes has him argue for lying to a wronged man; his Ajax frames him more generously but as a political calculator. Euripides used him as a sophistic operator. Latin literature, reading the war from the Trojan side, inherited the hostile version: Virgil's Ulysses is dirus, dread, and scelerum inventor, deviser of crimes.

The Epic Cycle's Telegony gave him a further and stranger end: a son by Circe, Telegonus, arrives on Ithaca and kills him without knowing who he is — a death "from the sea", which is one way of reading Tiresias's prophecy in Odyssey 11.

Later reception

Dante placed him in the eighth circle among the counsellors of fraud and gave him a magnificent invented ending — a last voyage past the straits of Gibraltar into the unknown ocean, and shipwreck. That voyage is not in Homer at all, and it is the version Tennyson took up in Ulysses (1842), where the restlessness became admirable.

Joyce's Ulysses (1922) made him an advertising canvasser in Dublin and took the poem's structure as its scaffolding, which permanently changed what the Odyssey was understood to be about.

In modern adaptation

Screen versions have generally been drawn to the wanderings, which are four books of twenty-four, and away from the disguise, the testing and the lying, which are most of the rest. Christopher Nolan's 2026 film is discussed at length elsewhere on this platform; our reading is that its Odysseus is a more honourable and less deceptive figure than the poem's, and that this is a coherent interpretive decision with real costs. See the film's characters.

What this page does not claim

There is no evidence bearing on whether any individual behind this figure existed. Not weak evidence — none. The name does not appear in the Linear B tablets in a form that would settle anything, and no material find bears on the question. See Was Odysseus real?