Odysseus — called Ulysses in Latin — is the most distinctive figure among the Greek heroes. He is not the strongest (that is Achilles), nor the most beautiful (that is Peleus’s son himself), nor the most courageous in the simple sense (that is Ajax). He is the most clever — polytropos (“man of many turns”) and polymēchanos (“man of many wiles”), as Homer calls him. Odysseus is the Greek hero of the mind, the trickster who solves the unsolvable problem, the strategist who brings the Trojan War to an end with a wooden horse, and the wanderer who, against all the odds, makes it home to Ithaca after ten years of war and another ten of wandering.
Homer’s Odyssey is the most complete picture we have of any Greek hero, and the figure of Odysseus has had a continuous cultural life from Homer to the present. He is a model of endurance, an emblem of the long journey home, and a warning against the perils of cunning without conscience. Few figures in Western literature have been read in more ways.
Parentage and Early Life
Odysseus was the son of Laertes, king of Ithaca, a small rocky island off the western coast of Greece, and Anticleia, daughter of the wily Autolycus, who gave Odysseus his name (meaning “son of pain” — the od-, as in odynē, pain — or, alternatively, “son of the no one,” a pun on the name he will give to the Cyclops). He was the grandson of the master-thief Autolycus, who gave him his first name, and inherited from him a turn for cunning and even larceny.
He grew up in Ithaca, sometimes said to have been fostered by the centaur Chiron on Mount Pylos — although this is more often a tradition of the larger epic cycle. As a young man he went to Tiryns to see his grandfather, where the hero Heracles had once sat to warm himself by the fire, and where, accidentally, he was scarred on the thigh by a boar — a scar that would later serve to identify him to his wife.
He married Penelope, daughter of Icarius of Sparta, after winning a footrace among her suitors. The marriage was famously devoted; Penelope’s fidelity during Odysseus’s long absence is one of the great set-pieces of the Odyssey. Their son Telemachus was an infant when Odysseus left for Troy.
The Trojan War
When the war to recover Helen of Troy (Helen, the wife of Menelaus of Sparta, who had been carried off — or had eloped — with Paris of Troy) was declared, Odysseus’s first impulse was to refuse. The reason, in the early tradition, was that he had just been made happy by the birth of Telemachus; in the later legend, it was an oracle’s warning that if he went to Troy he would not return for twenty years. Odysseus, hoping to avoid the war, feigned madness. He yoked a horse and an ox to a plow and began to sow salt in his fields. The Greeks sent Palamedes to test him; Palamedes took Telemachus from Penelope’s lap and put him in the path of the plow. Odysseus turned aside to avoid hurting his son, and his madness was exposed.
The Greek tradition treated this episode in two different lights. The Pindaric tradition praises Odysseus for his prudence; the cyclic tradition treats him as having been justly punished for refusing the war, and credits Palamedes with the exposure. Palamedes would later be unjustly killed by Odysseus, an act of treachery that was among the great marks against Odysseus’s character.
At Troy, Odysseus was the indispensable strategist. He is credited with several of the great exploits of the war:
- The night raid with Diomedes, in which the two heroes killed the Thracian king Rhesus, stole his horses, and rescued the spy Dolon’s life just long enough to extract information.
- The Diomedes-and-Odysseus capture of the Palladium, the sacred image of Athena that protected Troy. The two heroes crept into the city by night, killed the guards, and carried off the image — an exploit that, in some traditions, ensured the fall of Troy.
- The throwing of the discus that accidentally killed the great Ajax — not in anger, but in a contest of strength in which the god Athena, jealous, deflected his throw. (Other versions have Ajax dying of madness at the loss of Achilles’ arms.)
- The wounding of Odysseus by the spear of the Trojan Hector or, in another tradition, by the great spear of Ajax. The wound never fully healed, and Odysseus would carry the scar to his death.
- The Diomedes-and-Odysseus embassy to Scyros to bring Achilles to the war. It was Odysseus who discovered the young Achilles hiding among the daughters of King Lycomedes, dressed as a girl, by offering gifts (jewels and a sword) and watching which “daughter” reached for the sword.
- The embassy to Philoctetes to bring back the wounded archer and the bow of Heracles, without which Troy could not be taken. Odysseus, by cunning, persuaded (or in some versions, by treachery, tricked) Philoctetes into coming.
- Most famously, the construction of the wooden horse. According to the Odyssey and the cyclic Little Iliad, Odysseus devised the plan; Epeius built the horse; the Greek heroes hid inside; Sinon was left behind to tell the Trojans that the horse was an offering to Athena; and the Trojans, against Laocoön’s warning (“I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts”), brought it inside the walls. That night the Greeks crept out and opened the gates, and the city was sacked.
In the sack of Troy, Odysseus is reported to have killed many of the defenders and to have been among the leaders of the Greek coalition. He is also credited, in the Little Iliad and in later sources, with the killing of Astyanax, the infant son of Hector and Andromache, by hurling him from the walls of Troy — an act of great cruelty that has been treated differently across the tradition.
The Madness of Ajax
After the death of Achilles, the arms of Achilles were offered to the worthiest Greek. Both Odysseus and Ajax competed. The arms were awarded to Odysseus, in a judgment said to have been made by the Greek prisoners of war, who preferred his eloquence to Ajax’s strength. Ajax, driven mad by Athena, fell upon the Greek cattle, thinking them to be the Greek leaders, and slaughtered them. Coming to his senses, he fell on his sword. The stain of this madness, in some traditions, is one of the great shadows on the otherwise brilliant record of Odysseus.
The Epithets of Odysseus
Homer’s Odysseus is given a series of epithets that are also a series of character descriptions:
- polytropos — “of many turns,” the man who turns and twists
- polymēchanos — “of many devices,” the strategist
- polymētis — “of many counsels,” the sage
- ankylometēs — “the one who meets no one in combat,” the man who is hard to engage
- diogenes — “twice-born,” a man of two births in some sense (the scar on his thigh counts as a kind of second beginning)
The epithets are not all positive. polytropos also carries the sense of a man who cannot be trusted, a man of twists, a man of craft and not of candor. In the Iliad Ajax calls him a “shouter” and a “skulker”; the great speech of Ajax in the Iliad, complaining that Odysseus gets all the credit for the work of both, is one of the foundational complaints of the soldier against the politician.
The Wounds of Odysseus
The Iliad describes a famous wound to Odysseus. In Book XI, he is wounded in the back by the spear of the Trojan Socus, while attempting to carry off the body of the wounded Greek Machaon. The wound is grave: it is reported to have pierced Odysseus’s shoulder. Machaon, the healer, treats him, and Odysseus, refusing to flee, is given a poultice and continues to fight. The Iliad says that the wound, of the kind made by a barbed spearhead, will never fully heal, and that Odysseus will carry the scar to his death.
The wound is symbolically significant. Odysseus is not a man who fights in the front line of the battle — Achilles and Ajax do that — but a man who comes and goes, who fights when he must and retreats when he can, who is wounded in the back because the front is too dangerous. The wound is the mark of his strategy: the cautious approach, the ruse, the cunning in place of the frontal assault.
The Trojan Horse and the End of the War
The construction of the Trojan Horse is the central exploit of the war, and the moment that has made Odysseus’s name. According to the Odyssey (Book 4), Odysseus tells the story to the Phaeacians; according to the Little Iliad and the cyclic tradition, the plan was devised by Odysseus and approved by Athena. The Greek ships were burned (or hidden behind the island of Tenedos), Sinon was left to tell the Trojans that the horse was an offering, and the city was sacked the same night.
The Odyssey says that the war was won when, in the tenth year, “by Athena’s will, the great city of Priam was sacked.” The phrase is the Greek equivalent of “by a clever trick.” The Trojan Horse is the supreme example of mētis — the cunning intelligence that is the Greek complement of force.
The Odyssey
The full story of Odysseus’s homeward journey is told in the related article on The Odyssey: A Complete Summary. To summarize: the war ended with the fall of Troy, and the Greek coalition dispersed for the homeward voyages, almost all of which went wrong. Odysseus’s voyage lasted ten years. He went to the Cicones, the Lotus-Eaters, the Cyclops Polyphemus, Aeolus, the Laestrygonians, Circe, the underworld, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Helios’s cattle, Calypso’s island, and the Phaeacians — and finally home to Ithaca, where he killed the suitors of Penelope, made himself known to his wife, and was reconciled with his father.
The Odyssey is not just the story of a voyage; it is the story of a man returning to a wife, a son, a household, a small rocky island, and a kingdom. The return is the goal. The cunning of the hero, in the Odyssey, is not just the trickery of the Trojan Horse; it is also the cunning required to recognize, after twenty years, the wife and the father and the household, and to take them back.
Legacy
Odysseus is the great Greek model of the politic hero — the man who survives by mind, who is not the strongest but the most capable, who goes home where others are killed. The tradition of Odysseus in Western literature includes:
- The Latin tradition, in which Odysseus is Ulysses, the wanderer of Virgil’s Aeneid (where Aeneas sees him in Hades) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
- The medieval tradition, in which Odysseus is Ulixes, the man of deceit, sometimes damned, sometimes praised, but always an object of fascination.
- Dante’s Inferno, in which Odysseus is in the eighth circle of hell for the deception of the Trojan Horse, but is granted a long speech in which he describes his final voyage past the Pillars of Hercules and into the unknown.
- Tennyson’s Ulysses, in which the old king, returned to Ithaca, declares that he cannot stop and must sail again.
- James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which the parallel with the modern wanderer is drawn.
- The modern psychological tradition, in which Odysseus is the model of the post-traumatic veteran — a man who has been through a war he cannot speak of, who returns to a home he has not been able to remember clearly, and who is the stranger in his own house.
From Virgil to Tennyson to James Joyce, the figure of Odysseus has been the model of the wanderer, the trickster, and the man who finally comes home. The Odyssey is the founding text of the long-voyage literature of the West, and Odysseus is the founding figure of the long-voyage story. The Ulysses Syndrome is a clinical term, derived from the myth, for the chronic depression and disorientation of the long-term exile — a reminder that the cost of the long return is sometimes real, even when the home is still there.
Last reviewed: June 2026.