Was Odysseus actually a hero? What classicists say most people get wrong about the Odyssey

Complicated. Brilliant. The man responsible for the Greek victory over the Trojans. Devoted husband and father who spent a decade trying to get back to his family. Hero. These are some of the things that spring to mind when we think about Odysseus. Some of this is true. But read the Odyssey and a very different picture emerges: a violent man for whom the ends justified any means, whose boasting led to the deaths of his crew, and whose devotion to his family is very much an open question.

“The dominant misconception about Odysseus is that he is a good guy,” said Eleanor Martin, a classics doctoral student who teaches classical mythology at Yale.  

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is out, and I had the opportunity to see the movie opening night with a group of classicists that included Joel Christensen, author of the just released Why Odysseus? Survivor, Scoundrel, (Anti)hero. Christensen and others weighed in on the message of the epic poem, and how Odysseus is so persistently misunderstood.

Was he a brilliant leader?

Beyond a doubt, Odysseus comes up with the idea for the Trojan Horse. He’s “wicked smart,” says Christensen, but this doesn’t necessarily make him a good person and “he’s not wise.” The protracted journey home to Ithaca is due to Odysseus’s flaws; namely his boastfulness and violations of the norms of hospitality.

One of the most memorable episodes in the Odyssey is Osysseus’s encounter with Polyphemus, the Cyclops. While the Cyclops does eat some of Odyssey’s men (which is a violation of ancient hospitality laws), Odysseus did sneak into his cave and steal provisions and later blinds Polyphemus with a stake.  Sarah Bond, associate professor of history at the University of Iowa, told me that “ultimately, it’s the hubris of taunting Polyphemus after blinding him that gets Odysseus in trouble. Polyphemus was Poseidon’s son and most of the delays in Odysseus’s return are due to the rage of the sea god. “Pride was Odysseus’s downfall,” said Bond, “but also this is a valuable lesson not to take other people’s cheese.”

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Then there’s the narcolepsy. Despite his many attempts to stay awake, Odysseus has a habit of falling asleep at inopportune moments. After acquiring a bag of magical winds from the god Aiolos, he almost brings his men home. They were so close the aroma of cooking food drifted to their ships. But then, Odysseus fell asleep, his men opened the bag (because Odysseus lied about its contents), and the resulting storm blew them all the way back to Aiolos’s island where the deity refused to part with a second bag.

One of the themes of the Odyssey is that there are different standards for different folks. While his men journey past the Sirens with beeswax in their ears, Odysseus can’t help but take the opportunity to listen to their song. If it seems as if the Cyclops had it coming because he treated Ithacans as crunchy snacks instead of guests, bear in mind that when Odysseus finally gets home he slaughters the suitors that he finds there. In the epic poem he had the enslaved women who had been coerced into relationships with the suitors hanged. Arguably, said Christensen, “the suitors have a far greater claim to be in Odysseus’s home than Odysseus did the home of the Cyclops. We are supposed to be okay with it because the Cyclops isn’t a human being who lives in a city.” Nolan alters this in the movie, but the families of the suitors who are slaughtered at the end of the epic, have no opportunity for restitution or closure, they are simply expected to forget and move on.

How about Odysseus as the devoted family man?

Among romantics, Odysseus is regarded as a devoted husband and family man who spent decades trying to return to his loved ones. This impression conveniently overlooks the fact that Odysseus spent seven years in the arms of a nymph, Calypso. He only left Calypso, Homer tells us, when Calypso stopped “being pleasing” to him.

In other words, he got tired of her.

Things grow more suspect when Odysseus later explained his actions to his wife Penelope. He claimed that he had refused Calypso’s offer of immortality and eternal youth (in Greek this is technically “agelessness”). Christensen explained that when you read the Greek carefully this isn’t quite what happened. Calypso tells Hermes that when she first met Odysseus, she had expressed the desire to make him both immortal and ageless. But the actual offer she made to Odysseus was just immortality.

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This isn’t just semantics. Christensen explained that both Odysseus and Calypso were familiar with the story of Tithonous, a gorgeous Trojan prince for whom the goddess of the dawn, Eos, had secured immortality. Unfortunately for Tithonous, Eos neglected to ask for eternal youth. The prince grew increasingly frail and decrepit, in one version turning into a cricket. Eos was repulsed by her former lover, put him in a box, and left him there babbling and begging for death. In turning down Calypso, Odysseus wasn’t rejecting life as a god he was rejecting an eternity as a cricket-crypt-keeper. But he sold it to Penelope as a sign of his devotion. Interestingly, said Christensen, we never learn Penelope’s response. “I like to think she rolled her eyes and said, ‘after twenty years, you’re still full of it’,” he added. 

Even as a father we must wonder if Odysseus was that attentive. In the opening books of the Odyssey, Telemachus misses his father and spends his time visiting those who knew him to try and work out if he was still alive and try to get to know the man who left when he was an infant. “Certainly,” said Bond, “Odysseus was focused on the Trojan War, but would it have killed him to try and send a letter? Yes, it’s the Bronze Age, but the Mesopotamians and Egyptians regularly send letters even centuries before the alleged events of the Trojan war.”

The Odyssey ends up being a reflection of when it’s read

Even on a basic level our impression of the Odyssey is a bit skewed. “The word ‘odyssey’ has become synonymous with ‘journey,’” said Park, but the “physical journey is pretty much concluded by the halfway point of the poem.” The most famous episodes, she added, are squeezed into about three chapters of the twenty-four-chapter work.

The reason for our confusion about Odysseus’s character comes down to changing definitions of what it means to be a hero. While the Odyssey has its villains—like the suitor Antinous—its heroes are not unambiguously good. Arum Park, a classicist at the University of Arizona, pointed out that a Greek hero was just “a famous male mortal from the mythic past.” Martin and Christensen added that it’s not clear that ancient Greeks thought their heroes were good. Christensen notes that the Greek tragedians of the fifth century BCE emphasize Odysseus’s more villainous qualities and present him as a smooth-talking aristocrat with sketchy motives.

Part of the reason why we think of Odysseus as a role model, said Christensen, is down to the Roman Stoics. “In the writings of Seneca and Cicero, Odysseus becomes valued for his ability to resist temptation, to endure suffering and to stay true to his mission.” The reason for this is that the Romans—much like many modern readers—weren’t reading the whole Odyssey. “They sample parts of it in education, where they would read sections of the Odyssey as part of their education in school and in preparing speeches.” Otherwise, Christensen joked, they are just sort of “vibing” through it.

Odysseus enters Christian tradition through Boethius, who makes him a model for resisting the Sirens. “Which is nonsense,” Christensen added, “because he wasn’t trying to resist them. Odysseus was tied to the mast. He set up a situation where he couldn’t go to them.” From there, Odysseus increasingly became a Christ-like figure, reimagined as, at worst, a flawed but fundamentally virtuous hero. You can still hear echoes of this Christian Odysseus in the Mumford and Sons song “The Cave,” said Christensen.

When it comes to the message of the Odyssey, Christensen, sees it as a story about trauma, survival, and discovering oneself in your relationships with family and friends. Odysseus himself is less a saint than an antihero—a Walter White, Tony Soprano, or Batman figure. “Odysseus, Achilles, and everyone from the age of heroes are both what we should emulate and what we should avoid.”