(European mythology)

Or Ulysses to the Romans. This Greek hero was King of Ithaca, a small island in the Ionian Sea. He took part in the Trojan War and earned the title Sisyphides for his devious schemes, the most successful of which was undoubtedly the wooden horse. Deceived by various ruses, the Trojans dragged this wheeled contraption into their impregnable city, and with it the Greeks hidden in its hollow belly. Odysseus was among these soldiers, who emerged at night and opened the gates to their waiting comrades.

After the sack of Troy, Odysseus began his homeward journey to Ithaca and this, the subject of Homer'sOdyssey composed in the ninth century BC, took ten years, even though the goddess Athena gave Odysseus her special protection. His adventures were many: in Sicily he acquired the undying enmity of Poseidon by blinding the sea god's son, the Cyclops Polyphemus; he encountered the Laestrygones, a cannibal race; on Circe's island he resisted spells, with the aid of Hermes, and compelled the enchantress to restore to human shape his men who had been turned into swine; his crew narrowly avoided shipwreck by the alluring Sirens, the bird women of storms, and by monstrous Scylla, a six-headed inhabitant of a cave in the straits between Italy and Sicily;he visited Lotophagi, the ‘lotus-eaters,’ descended to the underworld, and spent years on the island of the nymph Calypso, before, the lone survivor, he returned in disguise to Ithaca and found his palace occupied by fifty suitors. He persuaded his wife Penelope to promise her hand to the suitor capable of bending a mighty bow. Only Odysseus could string it, and with its deadly shafts he slew the suitors to a man. In the fight his only allies were two faithful servants and his young son Telemachus.

A Dictionary of World Mythology. Copyright © Arthur Cotterell 1979, 1986, 2003. All rights reserved.