Odysseus

Arrived Home Alone

Odysseus has no life outside the poems. He is the king of Ithaca who spends ten years fighting the Trojan War in Homer's Iliad, and ten more years trying to sail home in the Odyssey — the two poems put together somewhere around the eighth century BC out of much older material. At Troy he is the Greek who thinks: he talks the army out of mutiny, he handles the embassies, and when ten years of fighting have settled nothing, it is his idea to end the siege with a trick — a giant wooden horse, left outside the gates as a fake gift, full of hidden soldiers. Then he spends ten more years getting home — the Cyclops, Circe, the underworld, the sirens, seven years held by Calypso — and arrives alone, having lost every man who sailed with him, to find his own palace full of men courting his wife and waiting to take his kingdom. Later Greek writers did not admire him. In Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba, the man of many turns is the one arguing for the expedient atrocity, and he is written as the villain.

Two Different Endings

Homer does not kill him. The prophet Tiresias tells him he will die gently, off the sea, in old age — but only after he carries an oar so far inland that people mistake it for a winnowing fan, a tool for tossing grain, having never seen the sea or a ship. A later poem ends it differently: a son he never knew he had, born to Circe, comes looking for him, they fight without recognizing each other, and Odysseus is killed with a spear tipped with the spine of a stingray — death from the sea, but not the gentle one Tiresias promised.