Odysseus tried to dodge the Trojan War by pretending to be mad
Homer's king of Ithaca is the hero who wins by thinking. He faked insanity to avoid sailing for Troy, unmasked a disguised Achilles with a hidden weapon, and spent ten years getting home. Even his name is a riddle: his grandfather reportedly chose it because he had angered so many people.
Odysseus, called Ulysses in Latin, rules Ithaca and stars in the Odyssey while playing a major part in the Iliad. His parents are Laërtes and Anticlea, his wife is Penelope and his best-known son is Telemachus. Homer's opening word for him is polytropos, rendered as the man of many devices by Murray in 1919, a man of twists and turns by Fagles in 1996, and a complicated man by Emily Wilson in 2018. His defining quality is mêtis, cunning intelligence.
Nobody knows where his name comes from. Robert Beekes proposed a Pre-Greek origin, and vase painters spelled it in a string of variants such as Olyseus. In Book 19 of the Odyssey, the nurse Euryclea suggests a hopeful name, but the grandfather Autolycus picks one tied to a verb meaning to be angry with, since he had quarrelled with many men and women. Etruscan artists later labelled the hero as utuse and similar forms on mirrors and urns between the fifth and second centuries BC.
The best-known tales of his early life come from writers such as Pseudo-Apollodorus and Hyginus, who lived centuries after Homer. Warned by an oracle that Troy would keep him from home for years, he yoked a donkey and an ox to one plough to look deranged. Palamedes exposed the act by placing the infant Telemachus in the plough's path, and Odysseus swerved. Later he found Achilles, hidden among women on Scyros, by slipping weapons among gifts and sounding a battle horn.
In the Iliad he serves beside Nestor and Idomeneus as a trusted adviser, calming the Greek camp when Agamemnon tests morale and urging a grieving Achilles to let the troops eat before fighting. Readers have long set him against Achilles, whose rage consumes him, and against the strongman Ajax, whom Shakespeare called beef-witted. Some later versions darken the picture: in one, Odysseus frames Palamedes with a forged letter and planted gold as revenge for exposing his ploy.
Source: Odysseus
