Odysseus
A heroism of cunning and endurance rather than force: the man who crosses all the known world only to regain a single island, and chooses to be mortal.
myth · 750 BCE
Hero of Homer's , Odysseus is the king of Ithaca held ten years far from home after the Trojan War, whose end his ruse of the wooden horse had precipitated. Where the of the embodies force and brief glory, Odysseus is the hero of cunning intelligence, patience and return: his epic is no conquest but a long crossing of trials, temptations and traps toward his home, his wife and his kingdom. An inexhaustible figure, he was in turn raised into an enduring sage by the , damned as a sacrilegious explorer by Dante, reread by and , in Dialectic of Enlightenment, as the first face of , and transposed by Joyce into a single Dublin day.
Where force shatters, cunning opens a way through: to each situation its own feint, and the intelligence that fits the particular case is worth more than the courage that charges in.
No enchanted island is worth my own: across all the known world, I seek only to regain my land, my house and my own people.
To lie is not to betray: speech is a weapon, and the well-placed feint saves where frankness loses.
A goddess offered me never to age or die; I chose my mortal wife and my life as a man: the price of an existence is to end.
I do not flee the Sirens' song: I bind myself to the mast to hear it without perishing, to enjoy and to desire, yet never cease to be master aboard.
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Justification
Odysseus's knowledge comes not from pure reasoning but from experience of the world: the proem praises him for having seen the cities of many men and known their minds. It is by roaming, undergoing, observing that he learns, each ordeal adding to his knowledge of men and things. His intelligence is that of one who has seen much, not of one who has deduced much.
He saw the cities of many men and knew their minds.Odyssey, I, 3
Odyssey, I, 3 (the proem)
Justification
Odysseus neither represses his desires nor becomes their slave: he governs them by calculation. Warned of the Sirens' deadly song, he does not stop his ears like his men but has himself bound to the mast to hear it without yielding, satisfying the desire to know while stripping himself in advance of the power to succumb. Not asceticism, not excess, but an economy of desire ruled by the end.
Odyssey, XII, 39-54, 158-200 (the Sirens and the binding to the mast)
Justification
Odysseus's existence is structured by a single project that gives it sense and direction, the return, to which he subordinates years, pleasures and detours. Yet this project is wholly turned toward the restoration of a past: to regain his rank, his wife, his son, to set his fathers' house back in order. The great traveler is no man of the present or of novelty: he strains forward in order to re-establish what once was, binding the drive of the project to the memory of his origin.
Odyssey (the return as the end of ten years of trials) · Odyssey, XVI-XXIII (the recognitions of Telemachus, Eumaeus, Eurycleia, Penelope)
Justification
Odysseus's life is first of all action, enterprise and engagement with the world, more than contemplative withdrawal: he acts, sails, negotiates, governs. His worth lies in intelligence thrown into the ordeal, not in self-examination; yet his soliloquies, his narratives and his tears show he is not, for all that, without an inner life, and that in him the opposition is never clear-cut.
Odyssey, IX-XII (the narration of his exploits to the Phaeacians) · Odyssey, XIII-XXII (the patient action of the return)
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Justification
Facing adversity, Odysseus neither resigns himself nor claims to bend everything: he distinguishes the two. He acts tirelessly where he has a grip, building his raft, forcing his ruses, but endures what is beyond him, the wrath of , the lost years, the waiting. At the height of his fury he addresses his own heart and orders it to hold. This self-mastery, which distinguishes the changeable from the inevitable, later made him the enduring sage of the .
Endure, my heart; you have borne worse before this.Odyssey, XX, 18
Odyssey, XX, 18-21 ("Endure, my heart") · Odyssey, V (the raft and endurance at sea) · Odyssey, I, V (the wrath of Poseidon)
Justification
Odysseus is nothing of an : he savors the good meal, wine, sleep, the bed of a goddess as of his wife; bodily pleasures have their full and guiltless place with him. He tends not to abandon himself to them to the point of forgetting his end, as a man who means to stay master of his course; yet the Odyssey also shows him lingering, a whole year with Circe, forgetful of his return for a time, proof that this mastery is by no means infallible.
Odyssey, VIII-X (the feasts with Alcinous and Circe) · Odyssey, V, X (Calypso and Circe)
Justification
For Odysseus, the good of a life is neither pleasure nor the blissful oblivion Calypso offers, but the fulfilment of his own life: to become fully who he is again, king, husband and father, in his recovered home. He leaves immortal delight for this task of an existence carried through to its end and its form, closer to a concrete , the flourishing of a whole life, than to a mere pursuit of pleasure.
Odyssey, V, 203-224 (the refusal of Calypso) · Odyssey, XIII-XXIII (the recovery of his household)
Justification
From the very first line, Homer calls him the man "of many turns": his excellence is not the strength of the arm but , the intelligence that invents the parry fitted to each situation. Where ten years of siege fail, the wooden horse takes Troy; shut in the Cyclops's cave, he trusts not courage but a stratagem, the wine and the name "Nobody". His rule is never fixed in advance: he reads the singular case and shapes to its measure the ruse that fits, making adaptation to the particular, not the application of a principle, the very form of skill.
Homer, Odyssey, I, 1-4 (the proem: the man "of many turns") · Odyssey, VIII (Demodocus's song of the wooden horse) · Odyssey, IX, 345-414 (the Cyclops's cave and the name "Nobody")
Justification
The whole Odyssey is strung on a single desire, , the return: Odysseus crosses the known world and refuses the islands where he might settle, happy and forgetful, only to regain Ithaca, his rocky land. Held by the nymph , he spends his days on the shore weeping toward the sea and his home. The marriage bed he carved himself from a living olive tree, rooted in the ground, says plainly enough that for him identity and happiness rest on rootedness, not on the elsewhere.
Odyssey, V, 151-158 (weeping toward the sea on Calypso's island) · Odyssey, XXIII, 183-204 (the bed carved from the rooted olive tree)
Justification
Odysseus is the epic's great liar, and the poem does not blame him for it: he forges "Cretan tales" in which he gives himself a false identity, disguises himself as a beggar to get home, deceives the Cyclops as he does his hosts. When unmasks him, she does not reproach him but smiles and loves him for this virtuosity of , guile: the goddess shares his taste for the skilled lie. His speech serves the end he pursues more than it tells the truth; yet this cunning has its counterpart, when pride betrays him and, naming himself in triumph, he taunts the Cyclops at the risk of losing everything.
Odyssey, XIII, 256-286; XIV, 191-359; XIX (the Cretan tales) · Odyssey, XIII, 287-302 (Athena admires and praises his cunning)
Justification
What moves Odysseus is not a duty toward humanity but attachment to his own. The world of the Odyssey is ruled by , the sacred bond of hospitality, and from it Odysseus draws a sharp dividing line between those to whom he owes everything and rewards, the swineherd , the nurse , the old dog , and those who have betrayed the house. His justice honors first of all loyalty to his own hearth.
Odyssey, XIV (the loyalty of the swineherd Eumaeus) · Odyssey, XVII, 291-327 (the old dog Argos) · Odyssey, XIX, 386-475 (the recognition by Eurycleia)
Justification
Home again, Odysseus seeks neither to correct nor to deter: he renders their due to those who have betrayed the house. The fault, for him, calls for a punishment to its measure, and his domestic justice is retributive: to restore the order that was wronged is to make the offense pay, at the risk of a harshness the poem lets one feel.
Odyssey, XXI-XXII (the return to the household and the confrontation with the suitors)
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Justification
Violence, in Odysseus, always claims to be commanded by an end and legitimated by a wrong: the wooden horse wins a war he holds to be just; his return confronts suitors who have violated , squandered his goods and courted his wife. He does not exalt force for its own sake, in the manner of a : he uses it as an instrument, when cunning no longer suffices, in the service of a right he judges trampled. Yet the pitiless severity of his vengeance exceeds the measure of a mere right restored, and the poem lets the difficulty of a justice that tips into violence come to the surface.
Odyssey, VIII (the wooden horse) · Odyssey, XXII (the final confrontation with the suitors)
Justification
Odysseus is no scorner of order: he is the lawful king of Ithaca, and his whole return aims to restore a legitimate authority usurped by the suitors. He commands, demands obedience from his own, re-establishes the hierarchy of hearth and kingdom; where sets conscience against power, he embodies the legitimate power that takes back its due, even though the final peace is sealed only by the intervention of , a sign that this restoration still partly escapes him.
Odyssey, XXI-XXII (the contest of the bow and the retaking of the household); XXIV (the peace sealed by Athena)
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Justification
offers him immortality and eternal youth if he stays; he refuses, to regain , mortal, and his perishable life as a man. It is not that he scorns life, which on the contrary he defends fiercely against every peril, but that no survival away from home is worth the return to him. This choice thus places all worth on the side of finite, earthly existence, not of a beyond or a higher state: without denying the gods, omnipresent in his world, Odysseus makes mortal life, with its ending, the good he prefers, finitude embraced against whatever would transcend it.
Odyssey, V, 203-224 (the refusal of Calypso: mortal Penelope preferred to the goddess)
Justification
Odysseus trusts no one on their word: he tests loyalty before revealing himself, sounds out his servants, tries even and his aged father. This methodical wariness betrays a cautious, unillusioned view of men, quick to treachery once the chance offers; but it does not amount to a settled pessimism, since the poem also grants him, in a few, an unfailing fidelity.
Odyssey, XIII-XXIV (the disguise and the testing of loyalties) · Odyssey, XXIII (the test of the bed, which Penelope turns back against him)