Odysseus, called Ulysses by the Romans, was king of Ithaca, one of the Ionian Islands, son of Laertes and husband of the faithful Penelope. Homer calls him polytropos, "of many turns": he is not the strongest hero but the cleverest, able to talk, lie, disguise himself and find impossible way outs. Athena, goddess of intelligence, always protects him.
At the Trojan War
Odysseus had been one of Helen's suitors but preferred Penelope; it was he who proposed the oath by which all the princes promised to defend the husband Helen chose. When the war came he tried to avoid it by pretending to be mad, ploughing the beach and sowing salt. Palamedes put the baby Telemachus in front of the plough and Odysseus stopped, proving he was sane. At Troy he was adviser, envoy, spy and warrior, and above all the inventor of the wooden horse that ended the siege.
The voyage home
The return, told in the Odyssey, took ten years because Odysseus had angered Poseidon by blinding his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus. Since antiquity people have tried to place the stages on a map: these are only guesses, because the world of the Odyssey is largely imaginary.
| Stage | What happens | Suggested location |
|---|---|---|
| Cicones | Odysseus sacks Ismarus but loses many men | Thrace |
| Lotus-eaters | Whoever eats the lotus forgets home | Libya or Tunisia (Djerba) |
| Polyphemus | The Cyclops eats six men; Odysseus blinds him, calling himself "Nobody" | Sicily |
| Aeolus | The king of the winds gives him a bag of winds; the crew opens it | Aeolian Islands |
| Laestrygonians | Cannibal giants destroy eleven of twelve ships | Uncertain |
| Circe | The witch turns the crew into pigs; Odysseus stays a year | Monte Circeo |
| Hades | Odysseus consults the seer Tiresias, meets his mother and Achilles | At the edge of the world |
| Sirens | Odysseus has himself tied to the mast to hear their song | Bay of Naples |
| Scylla and Charybdis | A six-headed monster and a whirlpool | Strait of Messina |
| Thrinacia | The crew eat the Sun's cattle and die in a shipwreck | Sicily |
| Calypso | The nymph keeps him seven years on Ogygia, offering immortality | Uncertain |
| Phaeacians | Shipwrecked, he is welcomed by Nausicaa and King Alcinous, who take him home | Corfu |
Back on Ithaca
Odysseus arrives on Ithaca disguised as a beggar. In his palace more than a hundred suitors of Penelope feast on his wealth. Penelope has held them off for years with a trick: by day she wove a shroud for her father-in-law Laertes, promising to choose a husband when it was done, and by night she unpicked it. Recognised by his old dog Argos, who dies of joy, and by his nurse Eurycleia from a scar, Odysseus wins the contest of the bow, which only he can string, and with his son Telemachus kills the suitors. Penelope tests him with the secret of their bed, built around an olive trunk: only the real Odysseus could know it.
See also the Trojan War, monsters of myth and places of myth.