Odysseus is the most modern-seeming of the Homeric heroes, because his defining quality is not strength but intelligence, cunning, eloquence, adaptability, and the capacity for deceit. Homer's epithet for him is polytropos, "the man of many turns," and it applies both to his wanderings and to his wits. It is his stratagem, the wooden horse, that finally takes Troy after ten years of siege.
The Odyssey then follows his ten-year struggle to return home to Ithaca, a voyage through a landscape of monsters and temptations, the Cyclops Polyphemus, whom he blinds and escapes by calling himself "Nobody"; the enchantress Circe; the Sirens; Scylla and Charybdis; the seven years held by the nymph Calypso, each of which he survives by craft and endurance rather than force. Returning home disguised as a beggar, he reclaims his household and his faithful wife Penelope by slaughtering the suitors who have besieged her. Later Greek tradition was more ambivalent about him than Homer, sometimes casting his cleverness as unscrupulousness; but as the archetype of the wanderer who thinks his way home, he became one of the most enduring figures in Western literature.