Odysseus
Man of Many Turns
oh-DISS-ee-us
The hero who wins by thinking, sacker of Troy by trickery, and ten years getting home for it.
Domains
CunningEnduranceHomecomingRhetoric
Symbols
The Great BowOlive-Wood BedWooden HorseRaft
The Story
The wooden horse is his idea, and the war ends because of it. The journey back takes as long as the siege did: the Cyclops, the lotus, Circe, the underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, seven years held by Calypso. Every crewman dies; he keeps going.
His defining flaw is the same as his gift, he cannot resist a good exit line, and shouting his real name at the blinded Polyphemus is what puts Poseidon on him for a decade. He comes home alone, in disguise, and takes back his house by winning an archery contest with his own bow.
Did You Know?
- The word odyssey now means any long eventful journey, in every European language.
- The Odyssey offers its own etymology for his name, tying it to a verb meaning to cause or suffer pain, the man of wrath, or the man people are angry at, depending how you take it.
- His nurse recognises him after twenty years by a scar on his thigh, and Homer stops the entire scene to tell the story of the boar that made it. Auerbach built a famous essay on that digression.