Homer’s Characters that I Struggled with Most: Odysseus

Over the years, I’ve discovered that the Homeric characters I most enjoy writing about are often the ones I struggle with most: Helen, Achilles, Odysseus, even the gods themselves. I’m going to revisit some of the characters I still haven’t quite figured out.

Let’s begin with perhaps the slipperiest of them all.

Odysseus: Trickster, Statesman, Scoundrel … Hero?

Let’s start off with a fun survey.

• You prefer understated eloquence over full-bore bluster.

• Your first instinct in any conflict is compromise and negotiation, not escalation and digging in your heels.

• Your weapon of choice is your words, not your fists.

• Your family matters more than anything, and you would make any sacrifice to protect them.

If this is you, then you might be Odysseus.

But then again…

• You cynically pander to a fraudulent, blustering boss—telling him exactly what he wants to hear—to serve your own ambitions.

• You routinely manipulate people less intelligent than yourself—sometimes into committing the vilest of crimes—simply in order to keep your own hands clean.

• You will readily murder another parent’s child if you think it might help in protecting your own.

If this is you, then you too are Odysseus.

And that, dear reader, sums up the challenge of writing the Odysseus character in The Full Disclosure Iliad. Because Odysseus—in my view the Trojan War’s most pivotal character—is also its most maddeningly complex. Neither a “white-hat hero” nor a “black-hat villain,” Odysseus is everything, all at once. He is the most delightful, intelligent, charming and clever man you will ever meet—but equally the most selfish, manipulative and downright despicable man you will ever meet too.

Put succinctly in ancient Greek—Odysseus is polytropos.

Homer introduces his Odyssey hero with that wonderfully slippery word. But with no precise English equivalent for polytropos, translators down through the centuries have variously settled on “shrewd,” “resourceful,” “crafty,” “adventurous,” “versatile,” “ingenious,” “wily,” “many-sided,” “much travelled,” and “shifty.” Emily Wilson famously went with “complicated.”

Because, without a doubt, Odysseus is one complicated man.

A Word About Morality—or the Lack of It

Odysseus’ patron goddess is Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom. Throughout the Iliad, and especially in Homer’s Odyssey, Athena is Odysseus’ protector, cheerleader and enthusiastic co-conspirator. In Book 13 of the Odyssey, Athena says—in my loose paraphrase: “O Odysseus! Cunning, subtle and tricky beyond all bounds. A man—or even a god—would need to be a master of deceit to outwit you! Swindler, daredevil, liar, cheat! How could I ever abandon a man as delightfully eloquent and quick-witted as you?”

Note that Athena does not praise Odysseus for his honesty, his compassion, his fidelity, his fairness, or even his basic human decency. Athena isn’t much interested in whether Odysseus is a “good man” by our modern understanding of the term. She delights in the fact that he is extraordinarily good at being Odysseus.

What Homer’s heroic world prizes instead are qualities like power, courage, excellence, intelligence and—in Athena’s beloved mortal—situational pragmatism. That, and his ability to pull off both his capers and his crimes with such considerable panache.

Evolving Odysseus: The Classical Greeks

Homer’s epics were composed around the eighth century BCE but are set centuries earlier, in the legendary world of the Trojan War. By the Classical Greek era, perspectives on Odysseus had begun to change. Under the pens of brilliant Athenian playwrights such as Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the Greeks began rethinking and reimagining Homer’s most celebrated characters—and the war Homer’s Iliad describes.

Odysseus did not come out of that reimagining particularly well. Those same qualities that Homer’s Athena had celebrated—cunning, audacity, eloquence, deceit—could now become vices.

Listen, for example, to the playwright Euripides (480–406 BCE)—again, in my paraphrase. In Hecuba, Odysseus is “that shifty-hearted butcher knife; that sweet-coaxing, pandering son of Laertes.” In The Women of Troy, he is “a perjured impious outcast” and “a monster of wickedness,” a man whose tongue can twist truth into lies and friendship into hate.

And in Palamedes, Odysseus does something so despicable that … you’ll find it in Chapter Seven of The Full Disclosure Iliad.

Evolving Odysseus: Virgil’s Aeneid

The Roman poet Virgil wasn’t any kinder to Odysseus. In Virgil’s Aeneid—Rome’s great origin story—Odysseus, or “Ulysses” as the Romans called him, gets a serious reputational makeover.

Virgil’s Romans proudly traced their legendary ancestry not to the victorious Greeks but to the defeated Trojans, so the sympathies flip. We are now seeing the war through Trojan eyes. And who takes one of the biggest falls? Odysseus—the architect of the Wooden Horse, whose genius looks considerably more sinister when viewed from inside the city he deceived and destroyed.

What Athena once celebrated as cleverness can now look remarkably like treachery. Hence the sentiment that still echoes down through the ages: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.”

Evolving Odysseus: Dante’s Inferno

If Virgil turned Odysseus from hero into villain, Dante finished the job—and then sentenced him for it.

In the Inferno (early 1300s CE), Dante places Ulysses in the eighth circle of Hell, among the “fraudulent counsellors,” where those who used their intelligence and eloquence in the service of fraud burn inside tongues of flame. Dante’s case against Ulysses is more complicated than any single crime, but the trajectory from Virgil is unmistakable: the qualities that once made Odysseus brilliant—cunning, persuasion, deception—have become morally suspect.

Or, reduced to its essentials: Trojan Horse was deceit, deceit is fraud, and fraud earns fire.

So in the medieval imagination, Odysseus becomes not just the cleverest of men, but the damnedest. After Dante consigned Odysseus to flame, the centuries grew quieter—until Hollywood came calling.

Evolving Odysseus: 20th- and 21st-Century Hollywood Takes

Twentieth-century renditions of Odysseus tended to airbrush away his darker edges, preferring less “the man of many turns” and more “the man of magnificent biceps.” Check out Ulysses (1954) and Helen of Troy (1956) for a decidedly one-dimensional action hero. Later in the century, screenplays made more of a nod toward Odysseus’ brain than his brawn, but still steered well clear of those parts of the ancient tradition that might make us question the man’s essential virtuousness.

Then came the present century, when we began preferring our heroes considerably darker—think Tony Soprano, Walter White, Dexter Morgan, Tyrion Lannister, or the Batman of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. The miniseries Troy: Fall of a City (2018) gives us a baby-killing but guilt-ridden Odysseus, while The Return (2024) offers a shattered veteran, hollow-eyed and traumatized after twenty years away from home. It’s as if modern audiences finally rediscovered something Homer understood all along: heroes become considerably more interesting when they are capable of villainy.

When I first drafted this essay, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey had yet to arrive, and I wondered which Odysseus he would give us. Would Nolan keep his hero’s résumé relatively clean—free, at least, of the unforgivable sins of murdering babies and lynching blameless slave girls? Or would he embrace Homer’s truly polytropos Odysseus: brilliant, charming, manipulative, selfish, courageous, deceitful and occasionally appalling?

Well, July 2026 came. And now we know.

Nolan largely chose the cleaner résumé. His Odysseus remains wounded and complicated, but many of Homer’s darker contradictions have been polished away, leaving us with a man considerably easier for a modern audience to admire. I had rather a lot to say about that when the film arrived; both my pre-release musings and my full review now live on the BONUS WRITING page.

My Full Disclosure Odysseus?

Closest to my own understanding of Odysseus—and to my portrayal of him in The Full Disclosure Iliad—is Emily Wilson’s wonderful single word: “complicated.”

My Odysseus is an amalgam drawn from Homer—both Iliad and Odyssey—along with the revisionist Odysseuses of the Classical Greek playwrights and Virgil.

Was Odysseus a fun character to write?

Absolutely.

Is he moral, kind, decent, good?

Not by any measure I’d want applied to me.

Is he human?

Painfully so.