Odysseus

Meaning

Odysseus's name comes with an unusually rare feature: the poem that carries his name actually stops to explain where the name came from, inside its own narrative. In Book 19 of the Odyssey, the old nurse Eurycleia recounts how the hero's grandfather, Autolycus, chose the name at his birth. Autolycus explains his own reasoning directly: because he himself has been odyssamenos - angered, or made an enemy of - many men and women across the earth in his lifetime, the newborn child should be named Odysseus, so that the name carries forward his grandfather's contentious life. This ties the name to the Greek verb odyssomai, meaning "to be wroth with," "to hate," or "to cause pain to," giving Odysseus a name that can be read as "the one who causes hatred or suffering" or "the one who is hated." This is a striking case in Greek epic: an origin story for a hero's name built directly into the plot of the poem in which he is the protagonist, rather than something later grammarians and etymologists worked out after the fact from outside the text. Ancient Greek writers additionally floated related word-associations, connecting the name to odyromai ("to lament, to grieve") and to ollymi ("to perish, to be destroyed"), both of which fit the Odyssey's recurring themes of loss, mourning, and near-annihilation on Odysseus's journey home. Modern historical linguistics, however, treats the odyssomai derivation with real skepticism, for the same reason scholars are cautious about the Achilles/akhos-laos connection: a meaningful-sounding etymology invented or highlighted within the very text that celebrates the hero is a classic sign of folk etymology - a later, retrospective explanation fitted to an existing name because the story it tells is satisfying, not necessarily because it reflects the name's actual linguistic history. Robert S. P. Beekes goes further and argues the name is "typically Pre-Greek," pointing to the unusually large number of variant spellings the name takes across different ancient sources and dialects (including forms like Oulixes, which became the source of the Latin Ulysses) as evidence of a name that entered Greek from an outside, non-Indo-European source and was never fully regularized the way native Greek words are. Proposals for where such a pre-Greek name might have originated have ranged across northwestern Greece, Asia Minor, and even suggestions of Hittite or other Near Eastern connections, but none of these has produced a scholarly consensus. The honest state of the evidence is that Odysseus's "real" name meaning remains unresolved, even though the poem itself is confident it already told you the answer.

Carried By

• Character Odysseus

Sources