Odysseus

• 1. Introduction

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  Odysseus, the legendary king of Ithaca, spent ten years trying to get home after a war that had already lasted a decade. By the time he arrived, his wife had been fending off suitors for years, his son was grown, and the only creature to recognize him at the door was his dog, Argos. That detail alone captures something essential about this figure: the cost of cunning is time, and time is the one thing it cannot recover.

  Homer calls him polytropos, the man of many turns, or in one translation, "a complicated man." His name in Greek may derive from a verb meaning to be wroth, or to hate. His grandfather Autolycus, apparently in a sardonic mood, named the child to commemorate his own quarrels with the world. The life that followed the name would prove equally tangled.

  Who was this figure, and why has he refused to stay in the past? This documentary follows Odysseus across the sources that made him: from the epithets Homer chose to the Romans who despised him, from the philosophers who argued over his soul to the musicians and novelists who keep calling him back.

• 2. The Man of Many Names

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  Vase inscriptions from ancient Greece record at least six alternate spellings of the hero's name: Oliseus, Olyseus, Olysseus, Olyteus, Olytteus, and Ōlysseus. The Latin world knew him as Ulixēs, or the less approved Ulyssēs. That instability is not mere clerical variation. Some scholars have proposed that there may originally have been two separate figures, one called something like Odysseus and the other something like Ulixes, who were eventually merged into a single complex personality.

  The etymological trail is cold. Ancient authors tried connecting the name to Greek verbs for hatred, for lamentation, and even for perishing. None of these connections is certain. Robert S. P. Beekes has suggested a Pre-Greek origin for the name, possibly not even Indo-European. The Etruscans adopted his stories under the name Uthuze, which some researchers read as a parallel borrowing from a Minoan source. The phonetic instability between the Greek forms with a "d" sound and the Latin forms with an "l" may trace back to an Etruscan affricate that Greek and Latin each handled differently.

  Homer's preferred descriptor, polytropos, has occupied translators ever since. Andrew Murray in 1919 rendered it as "the man of many devices." Robert Fagles in 1996 chose "man of twists and turns." Emily Wilson in 2018 settled on "a complicated man." Each translator reaches for something slightly different, and none fully closes the question of what Homer meant.

• 3. Before the Ships Sailed

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  When the call came to join the expedition to Troy, Odysseus did not want to go. An oracle had foretold a long-delayed return home if he took part. He feigned lunacy, hitching a donkey and an ox to his plow, a combination whose mismatched strides would ruin the furrow, and he began sowing his fields with salt. It was Palamedes, acting on Agamemnon's behalf, who exposed the ruse by placing Odysseus's infant son Telemachus directly in the path of the plow. Odysseus veered away from the child, and the pretense collapsed. He carried a grudge against Palamedes for the rest of the war.

  His recruitment of Achilles involved a different kind of theater. The goddess Thetis had hidden her son among the daughters of a royal household on Scyros, disguised as a woman, because an oracle had predicted that Achilles would either live a long uneventful life or die young with everlasting glory. Odysseus arrived with a chest of gifts for the women: adornments, musical instruments, and weapons. Achilles was the only one among them who reached for the weapons. Odysseus then had his companions simulate the sounds of an enemy attack, and Achilles instinctively seized a weapon to fight back. His disguise was finished.

  These two stories, from mythographers Pseudo-Apollodorus and Hyginus who postdate Homer by many centuries, establish the pattern. Odysseus acts not by force but by reading people. He sees what others overlook and sets conditions that let the truth expose itself.

• 4. War, Cunning, and the Horse

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  Homer presents Odysseus in the Iliad as one of the most trusted counselors among the Greeks at Troy, alongside Nestor and Idomeneus. When Agamemnon tested morale by announcing a false intention to abandon the war and the army began to dissolve, Odysseus restored order. When heroes left the battlefield wounded and Agamemnon again wavered, Odysseus persuaded him to hold. He was dispatched as part of the embassy to convince Achilles to return to the fight, and he drew the wrestling match with Telamonian Ajax during the funeral games for Patroclus while winning the foot race with help from Athena.

  Homeric tradition explicitly positions Odysseus as Achilles's antithesis. Where Achilles is consumed by self-destructive rage, Odysseus is described as a man of the mean, known for self-restraint and the ability to speak persuasively. Shakespeare's description of Ajax as "beef-witted" points to the same contrast: brawn without wit, set against wit that could function without brawn.

  His most famous contribution to the Greek war effort was the stratagem of the Trojan Horse, a hollow wooden structure built by Epeius and filled with Greek warriors. Odysseus led the soldiers inside. He also participated in stealing the Palladium, a sacred object within Troy's walls that the Greeks believed they needed to take the city. Some late Roman sources claim Odysseus schemed to kill Diomedes on the return trip, though Diomedes is said to have thwarted him.

  The killing of Palamedes, who had humiliated Odysseus before the war even began, followed a different route. Odysseus allegedly forged a letter implicating Palamedes in Trojan treachery, concealed gold in his tent, and arranged for the evidence to reach Agamemnon. The Greeks stoned Palamedes to death. An alternate version says Odysseus and Diomedes tricked Palamedes into descending a well on the promise of treasure, then buried him in stones.

• 5. Ten Years on the Water

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  After the fall of Troy, Odysseus's fleet raided Ismarus in the land of the Cicones. Storms then drove his twelve ships off course and began a chain of encounters that would take a decade to resolve. The Lotus-Eaters made men forget their homes. The Cyclops Polyphemus ate several of his crew before Odysseus blinded him with a burning stake. Odysseus told the Cyclops his name was Outis, meaning Nobody, so that when Polyphemus cried out in pain and nearby Cyclopes asked who had hurt him, he could only answer that Nobody had, and they left him alone. Odysseus then rashly revealed his real name as they sailed away, and Polyphemus prayed to his father Poseidon for revenge.

  Aeolus, master of the winds, gave Odysseus a leather bag containing all winds except the westerly one needed to reach Ithaca. While Odysseus slept, his sailors opened the bag thinking it held gold. The winds escaped and drove the ships backward. The cannibalistic Laestrygonians destroyed all but Odysseus's ship. Circe, the witch-goddess, transformed half his crew into swine. Hermes warned Odysseus in advance and supplied a drug called moly that resisted her magic. Circe, attracted to his resistance, fell in love with him. His crew stayed on her island for a year.

  Guided by Circe, they crossed to the edge of the world where Odysseus summoned the spirit of the prophet Tiresias and then encountered the shade of his own mother, who had died of grief during his absence. This is where he first learned that Penelope's suitors were threatening his household. Scylla ate six of his men as they passed. His remaining crew slaughtered the sacred cattle of Helios on Thrinacia despite Tiresias's warning. Zeus sent a storm that killed them all. Odysseus washed ashore on the island Ogygia, where Calypso held him as her lover for seven years before Hermes instructed her to release him.

  The Phaeacians, led by King Alcinous, finally carried him home while he slept, setting him on a hidden harbor in Ithaca. After twenty years away, Odysseus disguised himself as a beggar and made his way to his own household.

• 6. Homecoming and Its Costs

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  Argos, Odysseus's dog, recognized him the moment he returned after twenty years. No one else did. Athena had disguised Odysseus as a wandering beggar, and the household he reentered was occupied by suitors competing for Penelope's hand. His housekeeper, Eurycleia, discovered his identity when she washed his feet and felt an old scar from a boar hunt. Odysseus threatened to kill her if she told anyone.

  Penelope, not knowing who the stranger was, announced a contest: whoever could string Odysseus's bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe shafts could have her as wife. None of the suitors could string the bow. The disguised Odysseus asked to try. The suitors refused at first, but Penelope intervened. He strung it easily, won the contest, and then used it to begin killing the suitors. The first to die was Antinous, whom he caught drinking from Odysseus's own cup. He was helped by Telemachus, the swineherd Eumaeus, and the cowherd Philoetius. The serving women who had slept with the suitors were made to clean up the corpses and were then hanged.

  Even after all of this, Penelope could not accept that the man in front of her was her husband. She feared a god in disguise and tested him by ordering Eurycleia to move the bed in their wedding chamber. Odysseus protested that this was impossible: he had built the bed himself around a living olive tree, and one of its legs was rooted in the earth. Penelope recognized the answer as proof. The scholar Bernard Knox has described Penelope's earlier decision to set the bow contest as the turning point of the entire Odyssey, the move that made the hero's return possible.

  The day after the slaughter, citizens of Ithaca, grieving the deaths of the suitors' families, followed Odysseus out to his father Laertes's farm to seek revenge. Athena and Zeus intervened and persuaded both sides toward peace.

• 7. A Villain to the Romans

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  Virgil wrote the Aeneid between 29 and 19 BC for a Roman audience that considered itself descended from the Trojans through the hero Aeneas. In that context, the man who had engineered the Trojan Horse and tricked his way into the city was not a hero. Virgil refers to him throughout as "cruel Odysseus" (Latin dirus Ulixes) and "deceitful Odysseus." A character in Aeneid book 9 tells the Trojans they need not fear the frauds of sly Ulysses.

  Euripides had already complicated the Greek picture. In his Iphigenia at Aulis, Odysseus facilitates the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia by deceiving her mother, Clytemnestra, into bringing the girl forward on the false promise that she was to be married to Achilles. The cunning that Greeks admired struck Romans as incompatible with honor. His early attempt to dodge the Trojan War through feigned madness, the same act that the Greeks saw as clever, the Romans read as a violation of sacred duty.

  Virgil's Ulysses is, in Harold Bloom's phrase (describing the Ovid version), "one of the great wandering womanizers." Ovid retells his romantic involvements with Circe and Calypso and gives a detailed account of the contest between Ulysses and Ajax over Achilles's armor. The Romans did not deny his intelligence. They questioned his character. Dante placed him near the very bottom of Hell, in the eighth ring of the Eighth Circle, the counselors of fraud, wrapped in flame alongside Diomedes, for the schemes that had brought down Troy.

• 8. Afterlives in Every Medium

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  Alfred, Lord Tennyson published his poem "Ulysses" in 1842, imagining an aging king too restless for the throne, gathering old comrades to sail beyond the sunset. Nikos Kazantzakis extended the Odyssey into a 33,333-line modern sequel published in 1938, in which Odysseus, after cleansing himself of the suitors' blood, leaves Ithaca again, abducts Helen, incites revolutions in Crete and Egypt, and encounters figures drawn from Lenin, Don Quixote, and Jesus.

  James Joyce's Ulysses, first published between 1918 and 1920, maps the entire structure of Homer's epic onto a single day in Dublin, following a businessman named Leopold Bloom. Primo Levi, in the eleventh chapter of his 1947 memoir about Auschwitz, describes reciting Dante's version of Ulysses's last voyage to a fellow prisoner during forced labor. Eyvind Johnson's Return to Ithaca, published in 1946 in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, uses Odysseus's homecoming as a psychological study of what war leaves behind in people.

  In film, George Clooney played a version of Odysseus in O Brother, Where Art Thou? in 2000, Sean Bean played him in Troy in 2004, and Ralph Fiennes appeared in The Return in 2024. Matt Damon is set to play him in a 2026 film. In music, Cream recorded "Tales of Brave Ulysses" in 1967. Suzanne Vega's "Calypso," from her 1987 album Solitude Standing, tells the story from Calypso's point of view. Symphony X released a 24-minute adaptation of the tale on their 2002 album The Odyssey.

  In 2025, researchers identified what is believed to be the actual sanctuary of Odysseus at a site called Agios Athanasios in northern Ithaca, known since the 19th century as the School of Homer. Two late Hellenistic inscriptions were found bearing the name Odysseus in genitive and dative form. They align with a 1930s inscription from the Polis Bay cave reading "Thanks Odysseus." Among the finds were a miniature bronze bust of Odysseus, 34 clay votive fragments, loom weights, jewelry, and over 100 coins, spanning a period from the 3rd century BCE through the 2nd century CE. The man of many turns, it seems, inspired a cult as well as a canon.