Told a one-eyed giant his name was 'Nobody'
So that Polyphemus's neighbours ignored his cries after the stake went into his eye
Myth · Greek
Odysseus
Greek mythology — hero of the Trojan War and the Odyssey
King of Ithaca and the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, the man Homer calls polytropos, "of many turns". He devised the wooden horse that ended the ten-year war, then spent ten more years getting home through Cyclopes, enchantresses, whirlpools and the land of the dead, to find his palace full of suitors and his wife Penelope still holding them off. The Romans called him Ulysses, and European literature has never let him go.
How to spot them
- ▸Cunning rather than strength; the epithet 'of many turns' and the tag 'sacker of cities'
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Ithaca', 'Penelope', 'Telemachus', 'Laertes', 'Argos the dog'
- ▸Roman name Ulysses; a scar on the thigh that gives him away
- ▸A wooden horse, and a ten-year journey home from a ten-year war
Stories & episodes
Had himself tied to the mast while his crew stopped their ears with wax
The only man to hear the Sirens sing and live
Devised the hollow wooden horse that took Troy
Told in the Odyssey and in Virgil's Aeneid, not in the Iliad
Feigned madness by ploughing a field with salt to avoid going to war
Palamedes exposed the trick by laying the infant Telemachus in front of the plough
Spent a year with an enchantress who had turned his men into pigs
Circe on Aeaea; the herb moly protected him from her drugs
Steered between a six-headed monster and a whirlpool, losing six men
Scylla and Charybdis, the original lesser of two evils
Strung a bow that no suitor could bend, then turned it on them
The contest of the axes in the hall at Ithaca
His wife unpicked at night the shroud she wove by day
Penelope's three-year delaying tactic against the suitors
Quick-fire facts
- •King of Ithaca, son of Laertes and Anticlea; husband of Penelope, father of Telemachus
- •The Romans called him Ulysses (Ulixes)
- •Poseidon persecutes him because he blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon's son
- •Calypso kept him seven years on Ogygia before the gods ordered his release
- •His nurse Eurycleia recognises him by a boar-scar on his thigh; his old dog Argos knows him and dies
- •In Odyssey 11 he raises the dead, and Achilles' ghost says he would rather be a living serf than king of the dead
- •Dante puts him in the eighth circle of Hell; Tennyson's Ulysses sends him off again; Joyce's Ulysses maps him onto one Dublin day
- •The Odyssey's 24 books cover the last six weeks of a ten-year return
Drill it — 10 cards
1 / 10new card
Sources
- Homer — The Odyssey The primary source for the homecoming and all of its episodes
- Apollodorus — The Library (Bibliotheca) Epitome 3 and 7 for the feigned madness and the wanderings