Odysseus.

     One of the most famous Greek heroes, Odysseus was the son of Laertes, king of Ithaca, and Anticlea, daughter of Autolycus. Called Ulysses (Ulixes) by the Romans, Odysseus is best known through Homer’s twenty-four-book epic the Odyssey, which chronicles his long return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. The hero also figures in Homer’s Iliad and in the writings of Euripides, Sophocles, and Plato.
    Odysseus was one of many suitors vying for the hand of Helen, the fairest woman in all of Greece. Knowing that his low social status would keep him from winning her, Odysseus gave up his suit and advised Helen’s father, Tyndareus, to make all the suitors swear an oath of loyalty to whichever onewas chosen as bridegroom. Odysseus then married Penelope, the daughter of King Icarius of Sparta, and she bore him a son, Telemachus.
    When Helen was taken to Troy by Paris, Odysseus and all the other unsuccessful suitors were bound by their oath to help her husband, Menelaus, regain her. Thus began the saga of the Trojan War. Odysseus, however, loath to leave his family, feigned madness to escape his obligation. He was found out by Palamedes, for whom he later laid an elaborate trap that resulted in the young man’s death. After a tender farewell to his wife and son, Odysseus departed for Troy.
    Although a reluctant warrior, Odysseus took an active role in the Trojan conflict. He first tried to negotiate a peaceful end to the hostilities, leading an unsuccessful embassy to King Priam to demand Helen’s return. Odysseus was the one who found the young Achilles hiding among the daughters of King Lycomedes of Scyros and compelled him to join the Trojan expedition. Later, when Achilles had removed himself from the battlefield because of his quarrel with Agamemnon over the captive Briseis, Odysseus unsuccessfully implored him to reconsider.
    With Diomedes, Odysseus undertook two night expeditions into die Trojan stronghold, on one of which they captured the Palladium, the statue of Athena that protected the city of Troy. The theft set the stage for the sack of Troy. Odysseus also had a hand in the stratagem of the wooden horse, which led to the Greek victory.
    After the death of Achilles, Odysseus and Ajax competed to see which of them deserved to wear the hero’s armor; Odysseus’s skill at rhetoric assured his victory, which led the humiliated Ajax to commit suicide. Odysseus brought Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, and Philoctetes, owner of the charmed bow and arrows of Heracles, to Troy in fulfillment of a prophecy that said that Troy would not fall without their presence. According to some legends, during the sack of Troy Odysseus threw the Trojan royal prince, Astyanax, from the battlements of the city, assuring the end of Priam’s dynasty.
    Odysseus’s return to Ithaca after the Trojan War, chronicled in the Odyssey, took ten years. The voyage led him into numerous adventures, in many of which his shrewd resourcefulness served him well. Homer’s narrative begins on the island of the nymph Calypso, where Odysseus had languished for eight years, prevented by Poseidon from departing. The early books of the epic also relate Telemachus’s unsuccessful search for his father. With Athena’s intercession, Odysseus was allowed to leave Calypso’s isle and resume his homeward journey. He proceeded to Phaeacia where, as a guest of King Alcinous, hedescribed his previous ordeals. These included a stop at the land of the Lotus-eaters, where several of his men succumbed to the fruit of forgetfulness; imprisonment in the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus; a near disaster when Odysseus’s men opened the bag of winds given him by the god Aeolus; a battle with the cannibalistic Laestrigonians; a year spent as the lover of the witch Circe, who had turned his men into swine; a visit to the Underworld, where he consulted the shade of Tiresias; negotiation of the perils posed by the Sirens, Scylla, and Charybdis; a storm sent by Zeus after some of Odysseus’s men had slaughtered and eaten cattle belonging to the sun-god Helios (or Hyperion), in which all his remaining men perished; and the destruction of the raft on which he sailed from Ogygia, when he was saved by the sea-goddess Leucothea and delivered to the Phaeacian coast.
    When Odysseus arrived home in Ithaca, he found Penelope besieged by suitors, who had encamped at the palace in his absence. With the aid ofTelemachus and the goddess Athena, he slew all the suitors and was at last reunited with his wife. In thanksgiving for his safe arrival, he built a shrine to the god Poseidon. Many years later, Odysseus was killed by Telegonus, his son by Circe. According to an alternate tradition, Odysseus grew restless after several years at home and departed on another voyage.
    The Odysseus of the Iliad is portrayed as cool and cunning, but in the Odyssey he is also seen as possessing great self-control and fortitude, with a ceaseless yearning for home. Other classical authors, however, characterized him as heartless and unscrupulous. Classical vase painters often illustrated scenes from the Odyssey. Odysseus’s reputation suffered at the hands of medieval authors, who considered him villainous, in contrast to Aeneas, who was seen as pious and chivalrous. Odysseus’s prudence and pragmatic wisdom, however, won admirers: Christian apologists saw the pattern of his long journey, beset by temptations, setbacks, and danger, as an allegory for man’s earthly experience and preparation for heaven.
    Other versions of the myth state that Odysseus disguised herself as a wolf to hide from Hera and traveled to Delos in just twelve days to bear her twins, then journeyed with the newborn gods to the country of Lycia. There, prevented by Lycian peasants from either washing the children in a pond (or spring) or drinking the water, Odysseus asked the gods to transform the people into frogs, so that they could live in water for all time. This aspect of Odysseus’s story is especially popular in postclassical art.