Who Is Odysseus?

Everyone knows the shape of him before they know his name: the clever one, the man who thought of the horse, the wanderer who took ten years to get home. Homer's Odysseus is all of that — and the poem is careful to show that the same mind which gets him home is the mind that keeps him away.

The facts: king, husband, father

Odysseus is the king of Ithaca, a small, rocky island in the Ionian Sea. He is the husband of Penelope and the father of Telemachus, an infant when he sailed for Troy and a grown man by the time the poem opens. That domestic fact is the engine of the whole story: everything Odysseus endures is aimed at one house, one wife, one son. He is not questing for treasure or glory abroad. He is trying to get back to a family he has not seen in twenty years — ten at war, ten more lost on the way home.

Samuel Butler's public-domain translation introduces him in the first line:

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

The defining trait: cunning, endurance, eloquence

The first word Homer attaches to him is polytropos — "of many turns." It means resourceful, adaptable, hard to pin down; Emily Wilson's 2017 translation rendered it "complicated." Odysseus survives by intelligence far more than by force. In the Cyclops' cave he escapes not by strength but by a pun and a plan: he tells the giant his name is "Nobody," so that when the blinded Polyphemus roars for help, his neighbours hear that "Nobody" is hurting him and go back to sleep.

He is also the poem's great endurer — Homer's other favourite word for him is "much-enduring" — and its most persuasive speaker. At the Phaeacian court he narrates his own adventures so well that a room of strangers sits spellbound; the tale you think of as "the Odyssey" is delivered, across Books 9–12, as his own first-person performance.

His role at Troy: the wooden horse

Before the poem begins, Odysseus is one of the Greek commanders at the ten-year siege of Troy. Tradition credits the war's decisive trick to him: the wooden horse, left as a false gift, filled with hidden soldiers. Importantly, that scene is not in the Iliad — which ends with Hector's funeral — nor is it staged in the Odyssey. It is recalled inside the Odyssey: Menelaus and Helen remember it in Book 4, and in Book 8 a Phaeacian bard sings of the horse while Odysseus, still unrecognised, weeps to hear his own war. The stratagem is his signature — not a hero who wins by fighting hardest, but one who wins by out-thinking everyone in the room. For what led up to it, see the Trojan War backstory.

His flaw: the pride that costs him a decade

Homer refuses to make him clean. Odysseus' defining gift and defining fault are the same instinct — the hunger to be known as the one who did it. In Book 9 he blinds the Cyclops Polyphemus and escapes by his Nobody trick, flawless. Then, sailing safely away, he cannot resist: he shouts his real name back across the water, so the giant will know who beat him. Polyphemus is Poseidon's son. The boast hands the sea-god a named target, and Poseidon's grudge turns the rest of the voyage into a ten-year obstacle course. The scene is the hinge of his character — read why the Cyclops episode is not about a monster.

His arc: the ten-year return

His story is a nostos — the Greek word for homecoming (the root, with algos, "pain," of our "nostalgia"). Reaching Ithaca disguised as a beggar, Odysseus is recognised one relationship at a time: his son, his old dog, his nurse, his wife, his father. The reckoning comes in Book 22, when he kills the suitors who have besieged his house. To meet the whole cast around him, see who's who in the Odyssey; for the full shape of the poem, start with the Odyssey, explained; and to read him as the archetype of return, see the Odyssey as a story of homecoming.

The Home Pack ($19) follows Odysseus through name, disguise, scar, bow, and bed — the long work of being recognised again — alongside the complete digital poem in Butler's translation.