Cast portrait: Odysseus

This portrait is released the day Odysseus's arc peaks in the cycle, after Odyssey XXIV — Second Nekyia and Peace. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.

Son of Laertes and Anticleia, king of rocky Ithaca and the surrounding islands of Same, Dulichium and Zacynthus; husband of Penelope; father of Telemachus, an infant when he sailed. The only mortal in the cycle who appears in all four epics — and the only one whose portrait, summed across them, becomes radically harder to fix than any other. Homer's epithets for him are polytropos (man of many turns), polymētis (of many devices), polytlas (much-enduring). Already in those three words sit the four Odysseuses the cycle gives us: the diplomat of the Iliad, the active warrior and judge of the Posthomerica, the deceitful destroyer of Troy in the Aeneid, and the long-suffering survivor of the Odyssey.

In the Iliad

He is at the elbow of every difficult speech. In Book 2, when Agamemnon's bad-dream-trick assembly nearly empties the ships, it is Odysseus — taking the inherited sceptre out of Agamemnon's hand — who first rallies the kings with persuasion and then beats Thersites into silence with the same staff; the moment defines him as the speaker who knows when to coax and when to strike. In Book 3 he is described from the wall by Helen and Priam as the man who, when he speaks, "lets words fall from his lips like winter snow" — a different rhetorician from the soaring Menelaus. In Book 9 he leads the embassy to Achilles, and the speech Homer gives him is the most carefully constructed in the Iliad: he reports Achilles' gifts faithfully, suppresses Agamemnon's most insulting clause, and ends with appeal to Peleus's parting advice. Achilles answers him directly, sees through the rhetoric, refuses. In Book 10 — the Doloneia — he goes with Diomedes on the night raid that captures Dolon, finds out the Thracian position, and slaughters Rhesus in his sleep. The Doloneia is the Iliad's most morally compromised book, and it is Odysseus's book. He fights aristeia in Book 11, is wounded, and wins the foot-race at the funeral games of Book 23. He is everywhere and nowhere — the man whose interventions are always small enough to be invisible until you tally them.

In the Posthomerica

Quintus's Odysseus is more active and more militant. He is the strategic mind that, prompted by Calchas, fetches Neoptolemus from Scyros (Book 7) and, with Diomedes, fetches Philoctetes from Lemnos (Book 9). In Book 5 the contest for the arms of dead Achilles is judged — by captive Trojan women, in Quintus's striking detail — and Odysseus wins them over Ajax the Greater. Ajax goes mad and falls on his sword. This is the cycle's hinge moment for Odysseus's reputation: from here forward, in the post-Homeric tradition, he is the man who talked his way to honours Ajax's strength deserved. Book 10 is the prophecy that the city falls by his cunning; Book 12 is the building of the Wooden Horse on his plan, and the entry into it (Quintus gives Odysseus the leader's seat); Book 13 is the sack of the city, where Odysseus's prowess and brutality are equally visible. He saves the family of the prophet Helenus's father-in-law Antenor as a debt of guest-friendship — but the city itself burns under his planning.

In the Aeneid

He never appears on stage. He is the cycle's named villain. In Book 2, Aeneas, narrating to Dido in Carthage, calls him dirus Ulixes — "dread Ulysses" — three times, and the long story of Sinon (the planted Greek who tricks the Trojans into bringing the Horse inside the walls) is told by Sinon himself as a fabricated grievance against Ulysses, and named by Virgil as a fully Ulyssean piece of stagecraft. The Aeneid's Odysseus is the destroyer of Troy by deceit — the man who lied a city to its death. When the surviving Trojans see Achaemenides in Book 3, stranded by his comrades on the Cyclops's island, the picture is the Aeneid's only direct view of Odysseus's actions in the Odyssey, and it is filtered through Trojan terror: Ulysses is the man who got his men killed by Polyphemus and then left one of them behind. Virgil's choice is consistent — to give Aeneas's enemy his Trojan-eye name and his Trojan-eye character, the dark side of mētis.

In the Odyssey

Then Homer takes him back. The Odyssey is the cycle's longest defence of Odysseus, the slow rehabilitation of mētis from cunning-as-deceit to cunning-as-survival. He is given twenty years away from home — ten at war, ten on the way back — and the poem takes those ten return years as the proper measure of the man. We do not see him until Book 5; before that, his absence is the poem's whole subject. From Book 5 to 12 we follow his sea-journey: Calypso's island, the Phaeacians, and then his own narration over Alcinous's banquet of the Cyclops, Circe, the dead, the Sirens, Scylla, Thrinacia, and the loss of all his men. From Book 13 onward, on Ithaca, he is the disguised stranger — beggar, witness, planner — until he strings the bow only he can string and kills the suitors in Book 22. The reunion with Penelope in Book 23, where she tests him with the secret of the olive-trunk bed and he passes, is the cycle's quietest and finest scene. The Odyssey's argument is that the deceit is the price of survival in a world the Iliad's warrior code cannot answer, and that the marriage at the centre — Penelope's twenty years of weaving, Odysseus's twenty years of homeward turning — is what the mētis was finally for.

Across the cycle

No figure in the cycle changes more depending on who is looking. The scholarly question is the old one: is the Iliadic and Odyssean Odysseus the original, and the Aeneid's deceiver an Augustan distortion (perhaps by way of the Athenian tragic stage, where Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Hecuba and Trojan Women darken him sharply)? Or is the darker Odysseus implicit already in Homer — in the Doloneia, in Book 9's selective rhetoric, in the Cyclops's blinding, in the massacre of the maidservants — and the Odyssey's defence already an answer to a charge Homer's audience knew how to make? Both readings are alive in the current scholarship. The honest reading, and the one this readalong takes, is that Homer gives us the question and the four epics together give us the answer in shifting tones. The Iliad gives Odysseus enough rope; the Odyssey defends him with twelve thousand lines; the Posthomerica watches him win an unjust prize and build the Horse anyway; the Aeneid watches the city burn and names him by his Trojan name. Read together, the four make him the cycle's most fully drawn human being: the one figure who is the same man and a different man in every poem he enters.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.