Odysseus- Greek HeroHero"King of Ithaca"

The Man of Many Wiles

Odysseus ruled the rocky island of Ithaca in the Ionian Sea. His grandfather was Autolycus, the master thief and son of Hermes, who gave the boy a name the Greeks connected to odyssasthai, "to be wrathful against."

He married Penelope, a woman as clever as himself, and they had a son, Telemachus. Athena favored him, not for his strength but for his cunning, which she recognized as kin to her own.

The Reluctant Warrior

When the Greeks assembled to sail for Troy, Odysseus tried to stay behind. An oracle had warned that if he went, he would not return for twenty years. He feigned madness, yoking a donkey and an ox together to plow his fields and sowing salt instead of seed. But Palamedes placed the infant Telemachus in the path of the plow. Odysseus swerved to avoid his son, proving his sanity, and was bound by his oath. He never forgave Palamedes and later contrived his death through a forged letter and planted gold.

The Architect of Victory

At Troy, Odysseus served as strategist and diplomat. He found Achilles on Scyros, where Thetis had hidden her son among King Lycomedes' women. Odysseus laid out finery with a sword and shield hidden among it. Achilles reached for the weapons, and his cover was broken.

After Achilles died, Odysseus and Ajax both claimed his divine armor. The Greek chiefs awarded it to Odysseus. Ajax went mad with rage and fell on his own sword.

Odysseus conceived the stratagem that ended the war: a giant wooden horse, hollow inside, where the best Greek warriors hid while the fleet sailed away. The Trojans, despite warnings from Cassandra and Laocoön, dragged the horse into the city. That night Odysseus led his companions out, they opened the gates, and Troy fell.

The Anger of Poseidon

Odysseus's journey home took ten years. His troubles began when he blinded Polyphemus the Cyclops to escape being eaten. Trapped in the giant's cave, Odysseus gave his name as "Outis" (Nobody), so that when he drove a sharpened olive-wood stake into the Cyclops's eye, Polyphemus's cries of "Nobody is hurting me!" brought no help. Odysseus and his men escaped clinging to the bellies of the giant's sheep.

But as he sailed away, Odysseus could not resist taunting the blinded giant and shouted his true name. Polyphemus prayed to his father Poseidon: "Grant that he may never reach home, or if he must, let him arrive late, in evil plight, with all companions lost, in another's ship, and find troubles in his house." Poseidon heard and answered every word.

The Wanderings

Poseidon's curse drove Odysseus across the sea. The giant Laestrygonians cost him eleven of his twelve ships, spearing his men like fish from the harbor. On Aeaea, the witch Circe transformed his remaining crew into pigs. Hermes gave Odysseus the herb moly, and with its protection he faced Circe and forced her to restore his men. He stayed with her a year.

At Circe's urging, Odysseus sailed to the edge of the world and summoned the dead. Among the shades that came to drink the blood of his offerings was his own mother, Anticleia. She had died of grief while waiting for him. He reached three times to embrace her, and three times his arms closed on nothing.

He heard the Sirens' song while bound to his mast, and he lost six men to Scylla's jaws. When his surviving crew killed the sacred cattle of Helios despite his warnings, Zeus struck their ship with a thunderbolt. Odysseus alone survived, clinging to wreckage for nine days.

Calypso and the Phaeacians

Odysseus washed ashore on Ogygia, the remote island of the nymph Calypso, who kept him as her lover for seven years. She offered him immortality if he would stay forever. He refused. He sat on the shore each day, staring at the sea, longing for his mortal wife and his rocky island.

Athena pleaded with Zeus, who sent Hermes to command Calypso to release him. She helped him build a raft. Poseidon wrecked it. The sea goddess Ino gave him her veil, and he washed ashore on Scheria, land of the Phaeacians. At a feast in his honor, a bard sang of the fall of Troy, and Odysseus, hiding his face in his cloak, wept. The Phaeacians gave him rich gifts and carried him home at last.

The Beggar King

Disguised as an aged beggar by Athena's magic, Odysseus entered his own palace and endured the abuse of the suitors who had invaded it. They consumed his wealth and pressured Penelope to choose one of them. His old nurse Eurycleia recognized him by the scar on his thigh, a mark from a boar hunt in his youth, and he swore her to silence.

Penelope had held the suitors off for years by weaving Laertes's funeral shroud by day and unraveling it each night. Now she announced a contest: she would marry whoever could string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe handles. The suitors tried and failed. Then the beggar asked for a turn.

The Slaughter and Homecoming

Odysseus strung the bow easily and shot the arrow through the axes. Then he cast off his rags and turned the bow on the suitors. With Telemachus and the loyal swineherd Eumaeus at his side, he killed them all.

Penelope tested him. She told a servant to move their marriage bed. Odysseus protested: he had built that bed himself around a living olive tree rooted in the ground. It could not be moved. She knew it was him. Twenty years after leaving for Troy, Odysseus was home.

Tiresias had prophesied in the underworld that Odysseus must one day take up an oar and walk inland until he reached a people who knew nothing of ships or salt, a people who would mistake his oar for a winnowing fan. There he must plant the oar and sacrifice to Poseidon. Only then would the sea god's anger end. Death, Tiresias promised, would come to him gently, "from the sea." The lost epic Telegony told a darker version: Telegonus, Odysseus's son by Circe, came to Ithaca seeking his father and killed him unknowingly with a spear tipped with the spine of a stingray. Death from the sea, as the prophet had said.