Odysseus

Odysseus was born on the island of Ithaca, a rocky kingdom in the Ionian Sea off the western coast of Greece, to Laertes, a former king who had stepped aside, and Anticleia, a noblewoman of sharp wit. From his earliest years, Odysseus was known for his cleverness rather than his strength. When the Greeks assembled to sail for Troy, the greatest war in living memory, Odysseus tried to avoid the draft by pretending to be mad, plowing his fields and sowing them with salt instead of seed. But the recruiter Palamedes, a Greek prince of legendary cleverness himself, placed Odysseus's infant son Telemachus in the path of the plow, and Odysseus swerved to avoid the child, proving his sanity and sealing his fate. He sailed for Troy with twelve ships from Ithaca and its neighboring islands, leaving behind his young wife Penelope, a princess of Sparta renowned for her faithfulness and her cunning, and their infant son.

At Troy, Odysseus proved himself not as the mightiest warrior, for that title belonged to Achilles, the hero born of the sea-nymph Thetis and the mortal king Peleus, whose rage and grief defined the war, but as the most indispensable strategist. When Achilles was slain by Paris, the Trojan prince whose arrow found the one weak spot on the hero's heel, Odysseus and Ajax the Greater, the mightiest Greek warrior after Achilles, competed for the dead hero's armor. Odysseus won through eloquence, and Ajax, driven to madness by the loss, slaughtered a flock of sheep believing them to be his enemies, then fell upon his own sword in shame. As the war dragged into its tenth year, Odysseus devised the plan that ended it. He had the Greeks build a giant wooden horse, hollow inside, and hide their best warriors within it while the rest of the army pretended to sail away. The Trojans, believing the horse was a gift to the gods, dragged it inside their walls despite warnings. That night, Odysseus and his men emerged, opened the gates, and Troy burned to the ground.

The journey home should have taken weeks, but Odysseus and his fleet were blown off course by storms and cursed by the gods. They came first to the island of the Lotus-Eaters, whose honey-sweet fruit made men forget their homes and their purpose, and Odysseus had to drag his men back to the ships by force. Then they reached the island of the Cyclops, one-eyed giants who lived in caves and herded sheep. Odysseus and twelve of his men entered the cave of Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, the god of the sea, who ruled the oceans from his underwater palace of coral and pearl. The giant sealed the cave with a boulder and devoured two of Odysseus's men for dinner. When Polyphemus asked his name, Odysseus replied "Nobody," and when he blinded the giant with a sharpened olive-wood stake, Polyphemus cried out that "Nobody" was killing him. His fellow Cyclops ignored his screams. But as Odysseus sailed away, his pride overcame him, and he shouted his true name, allowing Polyphemus to pray to his father Poseidon, who cursed Odysseus to wander the seas for ten years, lose all his ships and men, and return home alone and destitute.

The wanderings that followed are the most famous voyage in Western literature. Odysseus survived the island of Aeolus, the keeper of the winds, who gave him a bag of breezes to speed him home, only to have his men open the bag in greed and blow the fleet back across the sea. He escaped the Laestrygonians, a race of man-eating giants who destroyed eleven of his twelve ships with boulders hurled from cliffs. He resisted the witch-goddess Circe, who turned his men into pigs with her magic wand, by using a protective herb given to him by Hermes, the messenger god, and then spent a year in her palace before she released him with directions to the underworld. There, in the realm of Hades, the god of the dead who ruled from the darkness beneath the earth, Odysseus poured blood to summon the spirits of the dead and received prophecy from the blind seer Tiresias, who told him that he would reach home only if he left the cattle of the sun-god Helios untouched. His men ignored this warning on the island of Thrinacia, slaughtered the sacred cattle, and Zeus, the king of the gods, destroyed their ship with a thunderbolt, drowning all but Odysseus, who clung to a raft and washed ashore on the island of Calypso, the nymph daughter of the Titan Atlas who was condemned to hold up the heavens.

Calypso kept Odysseus as her lover for seven years, offering him immortality and eternal youth if he would stay forever. But Odysseus wept daily for his home and his wife, and finally the gods, at the prompting of Athena, the goddess of wisdom who had always favored Odysseus for his cunning, ordered Calypso to release him. He built a raft and sailed again, only to be shipwrecked by Poseidon's final storm and washed up on the island of the Phaeacians, a blessed people who lived in a hidden harbor and were beloved of the gods. There, the princess Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, found him naked and starving on the shore, clothed him, and brought him to her father's palace. The Phaeacians, moved by his tale, gave him a ship and treasure and sailed him to Ithaca while he slept, depositing him on his own shore in a secret cove. He awoke to find twenty years had passed, his palace overrun by suitors who demanded Penelope choose a new husband, and his son Telemachus grown to manhood. Disguised as a beggar by Athena, Odysseus entered his own house, endured the insults of the suitors, and revealed himself only when Penelope announced she would marry the man who could string his husband's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads. The suitors failed, but Odysseus strung the bow with ease, and with Telemachus at his side, he slaughtered every suitor in the hall, reclaimed his throne, and was reunited with the wife who had waited twenty years, weaving and unweaving a shroud by day and night to keep the suitors at bay.