Odysseus

The schemer at Troy

Odysseus did not want to go to war. He pretended to be mad to avoid it, ploughing his fields with an ox and a donkey and sowing salt, until a Greek envoy placed his infant son Telemachus in front of the plough. At Troy he proved himself the most cunning of the Greeks, and after ten years of stalemate it was his idea to build a great wooden horse, hide soldiers inside and leave it on the shore as an apparent offering.

The long way home

His journey back to Ithaca took another ten years. He escaped the cave of the Cyclops Polyphemus by blinding him and calling himself Nobody, earning the lasting anger of Poseidon. He outwitted the enchantress Circe, sailed past the Sirens tied to his ship’s mast, lost men to the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, and spent seven years on the island of the nymph Calypso, who offered him immortality if he would stay.

Return to Ithaca

He finally reached Ithaca alone, disguised as a beggar. His faithful wife Penelope had held off more than a hundred suitors for years by weaving a burial shroud by day and unravelling it at night. Odysseus won an archery contest with his own great bow, which no one else could string, and with Telemachus took his revenge on the suitors before revealing himself to Penelope.