Character

OdysseusUlysses in this translation

King of Ithaca · husband of Penelope · father of Telemachus

Odysseus alone on the shore in the conical pilos cap that identifies him in Greek vase painting, chin on his fist, a sheathed sword lying across his knees that he does not reach for.
Odysseus alone on the shore in the conical pilos cap that identifies him in Greek vase painting, chin on his fist, a sheathed sword lying across his knees that he does not reach for.

King of Ithaca, husband of Penelope, father of Telemachus — and the poem's hero, famed not for strength but for cunning. The wooden horse that took Troy was his idea. The Odyssey follows his ten-year struggle to get home from that war, losing every ship and every man along the way, and what he does when he finally arrives to find his house full of rivals. Butler's translation calls him by his Roman name, Ulysses.

Homer's standing epithet for him is polytropos — 'of many turns'. It means both widely travelled and hard to pin down, and which sense a translator keeps sets the tone of the whole poem.

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