Odysseus, known to the Romans as Ulysses, is the legendary king of Ithaca and hero of Homer’s Odyssey, with a major role also in the Iliad and the wider epic cycle. Son of Laertes and Anticlea and husband of Penelope, he is famed less for brute strength than for intelligence, versatility, and cunning (mêtis), encapsulated in the epithet polytropos, the “man of many turns.” In the Trojan War he serves as a trusted adviser and strategist, opposing hotheaded heroes like Achilles and Ajax, plotting the downfall of foes such as Palamedes, and ultimately conceiving the Trojan Horse that brings Troy to ruin.
His homecoming becomes a decade‑long ordeal: raids gone wrong, the Lotus‑Eaters, his blinding of the Cyclops Polyphemus, misused winds, cannibal Laestrygonians, Circe’s sorcery, a descent to the dead, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, the slaughter of Helios’s cattle, and seven stranded years with Calypso. Returned at last in disguise, he strings his own bow, slaughters Penelope’s suitors, and reclaims Ithaca before divine intervention imposes peace. Later traditions spin out further adventures, alternate deaths, and tangled family genealogies.
Ancient Romans often cast him as deceitful rather than heroic, while later ages reinterpreted him endlessly—from Dante’s damned explorer to Tennyson’s restless old king and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom. His wanderings inspire modern novels, poems, films, television, and music. Archaeological evidence even points to cult worship of Odysseus in Ithaca and beyond, and his story is compared with other world traditions of the homecoming husband and divinely driven exile.