Odysseus

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.

The Odyssey did not arrive from a single author sitting down to compose it. It took shape through generations of oral poets working in a formulaic tradition, repeating and recombining set phrases and episodes across many performances long before the poem was fixed in writing, probably in the eighth or seventh century BCE. Homer, if the name refers to one person at all, is best understood as a name attached to a tradition of composition rather than proof of sole authorship, and the poem's repeated epithets and stock scenes are the fingerprints of that oral method.

Whether the Trojan War behind Odysseus's wanderings reflects a real conflict of the Late Bronze Age, and how much the excavated site at Hisarlik in modern Turkey has to do with it, remains debated rather than settled, with archaeology confirming a destroyed city in roughly the right period but not the specific war or heroes.

Odysseus's later reputation shifted sharply with his audience: Greek tradition prized his cunning as heroic resourcefulness, Roman writers reworked him as the devious Ulysses whose trickery cost Troy its innocence, and Dante placed him among the false counsellors in Hell for exactly the cleverness Homer had celebrated, a reversal that shows how the same character can be read as hero or villain depending entirely on who is doing the reading.