Odysseus
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, is celebrated as the cleverest of the Greek heroes. He devised the Trojan Horse to end the Trojan War and spent ten years wandering the Mediterranean before returning home, facing monsters, gods, and the temptations of the sea.
Odysseus, cunning king of Ithaca
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Core Myth
Odysseus was king of Ithaca and one of the principal Greek leaders in the Trojan War. He is credited with devising the stratagem of the Trojan Horse, which ended the ten-year siege. His return home took another ten years, during which he faced countless trials: he outwitted the Cyclops Polyphemus by blinding him, resisted the song of the Sirens, navigated between Scylla and Charybdis, and refused the goddess Calypso's offer of immortality. Upon his return to Ithaca, he found his palace overrun by suitors courting his wife Penelope. Disguised as a beggar, he strung his great bow - which no suitor could bend - and slew them all.
Why did Odysseus's journey home take ten years?
Two separate causes stack on top of each other in the Odyssey: Odysseus blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon, and the enraged sea god delays and wrecks his voyage across the entire poem in revenge; on top of that, Odysseus and his crew repeatedly bring disaster on themselves, most fatally by eating the cattle of the sun god Helios against explicit warning, which costs the rest of the crew their lives and leaves Odysseus to finish the journey alone.
Homer, Odyssey, Book 1
How did Odysseus escape the Cyclops Polyphemus?
Trapped in Polyphemus's cave, Odysseus gets the Cyclops drunk on wine, tells him his name is "Nobody," and then blinds his single eye with a sharpened stake while he sleeps. When Polyphemus cries out that Nobody is hurting him, the other Cyclopes assume nothing is wrong and do not come to help, and Odysseus's men escape clinging to the undersides of the Cyclops's sheep as he lets them out to graze.
Homer, Odyssey, Book 9
What did Odysseus learn from the prophet Tiresias in the underworld?
On Circe's advice, Odysseus sails to the edge of the world and calls up the shade of the blind prophet Tiresias to learn his fate: how to get home safely, the danger of eating the cattle of the sun god Helios, and a final warning that death will eventually come to him from the sea, in old age, gently. The consultation frames the rest of the poem as a fate already partly known rather than a purely open journey.
Homer, Odyssey, Book 11
How did Odysseus resist the Sirens' song without dying?
Warned in advance by the sorceress Circe, Odysseus has his crew plug their ears with wax so they cannot hear the Sirens at all, while he alone is tied tightly to the mast so he can hear the song without being able to steer the ship toward the rocks it lures sailors onto. He orders the crew to ignore any pleas he makes to be untied until they are safely past.
Homer, Odyssey, Book 12
How did Odysseus prove his identity to Penelope after twenty years?
Penelope tests him by ordering their marriage bed moved out of their bedroom, which Odysseus objects to immediately: he built the bed himself around a living olive tree, rooted in the ground, so it cannot be moved without destroying it. Only the real Odysseus would know this secret, and his reaction confirms his identity to her more convincingly than any physical scar or story could.
Homer, Odyssey, Book 23
How did Odysseus defeat Penelope's suitors?
Disguised as an old beggar by Athena, Odysseus returns to Ithaca unrecognized and enters an archery contest Penelope sets for her suitors: stringing Odysseus's own great bow and shooting an arrow through the sockets of twelve axe heads lined in a row. None of the suitors can even string the bow; Odysseus does both feats easily, then turns the bow on the suitors themselves and kills them with the help of his son Telemachus and two loyal servants.
Homer, Odyssey, Book 21
Why did Odysseus lose the contest for Achilles's armor to himself and not Ajax?
After Achilles's death, the Greek army votes on which of the two greatest surviving warriors, Odysseus or Ajax, deserves his armor, and awards it to Odysseus for his cunning contributions to the war effort rather than to Ajax for his raw combat strength. Sophocles's Ajax stages the aftermath: Ajax cannot bear the humiliation and is driven to madness and eventual suicide, a result later Greek audiences used to question whether cleverness should really outrank courage.
Sophocles, Ajax
Later Traditions
Odysseus became one of the most explored figures in Western literature. Dante placed him in Hell for his deceptions, treating the same cunning that made him a hero at Troy as a form of fraud once judged by later moral standards, while Joyce's Ulysses reimagined the entire Odyssey in modern Dublin. His character embodies the tension between cleverness and moral ambiguity: Sophocles's Ajax stages a rivalry in which Odysseus is awarded the dead Achilles's armor over Ajax by vote of the army, a decision Ajax cannot bear and that drives him to his own death, making Odysseus's victory a point where the epic tradition itself questions whether cleverness should outrank raw courage.
Also Connected
8 recorded connections, each with the ancient line behind it.
Enemies
Connected
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Aeolus hosts Odysseus for a month and sends him home with a bag binding every wind but a favorable one, then refuses to help again once the crew opens it and the storm drives the fleet back to his island.
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Boreas is one of the four winds Poseidon drives against Odysseus's raft, wrecking it and nearly drowning him on the way from Calypso's island.
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Circe hosts Odysseus for a year on Aeaea and gives him the instructions that let him survive the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis.
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Calypso recounts Eos's love for Orion to Odysseus as an example of the gods' jealousy over mortal lovers.
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Held fast by Menelaus, Proteus reports that Odysseus is alive but trapped on Calypso's island, weeping for a way home, the first news in the Odyssey's own story of where Odysseus actually is.
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Mythology
Appears In
Related Terms
Referenced By
Sources
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 1
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 9
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 11
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 12
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 21
- Homer, Odyssey, Book 23
- Homer, Iliad
- Sophocles, Ajax
- W.B. Stanford, The Ulysses Theme (1963)
- Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth (1993)