Odyssey — who's who

The hero of the poem and the inventor of the literary first-person travel narrative. Greek Odysseus; Latin and English-language tradition often called him Ulysses. He is famous less for strength than for cunning (mētis): he wins by lying, by disguising himself, by thinking ahead. The blinding of the Cyclops in Chapter 9 is the act that earns Poseidon's twenty-year wrath and makes the rest of the journey hard.

Odysseus's wife. Twenty years she has waited; for the last three, her house has been overrun by a hundred suitors who insist she must remarry. She has bought time with the famous loom-stratagem — weaving a shroud by day, unweaving it by night. She is intelligent, suspicious, and — as the recognition scene in Chapter 23 makes clear — a match for her husband at his own game of careful tests.

Odysseus's son, a baby when his father left for Troy and now a young man of about twenty. The poem's first four chapters — the Telemachy — are his coming-of-age. He travels to Pylos and Sparta, learns of his father, returns to Ithaca, helps his father plan the slaughter of the suitors, and ends the poem as the son who has become a peer.

Odysseus's old father, retired in grief to a country farm. He appears only at the very end of the poem, in Chapter 24, where Odysseus reveals himself with a final test — naming the trees of the orchard Laertes once gave him as a child. One of the most tender scenes in the poem.

The old nurse who raised Odysseus from infancy. In Chapter 19, washing the disguised Odysseus's feet, she recognizes a scar on his thigh from a boyhood boar-hunt — and Odysseus must silence her with a hand at her throat. Hers is the model recognition scene of the poem.

The most touching minor character in the poem. A man originally born noble, taken into slavery as a child, now keeping Odysseus's pigs in a hut at the edge of the estate. He receives the disguised Odysseus with full hospitality before knowing who he is. Homer pauses at one point to address him directly — "Then you, swineherd Eumaeus, said in answer..." — a rare gesture of authorial affection.

The third of the loyal household servants, alongside Eumaeus the swineherd and Eurycleia the nurse. He keeps the cattle out at the country station. When the slaughter of the suitors begins, he and Eumaeus lock the doors of the great hall — and fight beside Odysseus and Telemachus.

Not a person, but the most famous animal in classical literature. The puppy Odysseus raised and trained for hunting, twenty years old now, lying neglected and full of fleas on a dunghill outside the palace gate. As the disguised Odysseus walks past him in Chapter 17, Argos lifts his head, recognizes him, wags his tail once, and dies. The briefest and one of the most affecting recognitions in Western literature.

The leader and worst of the suitors. He plots to murder Telemachus, mocks the disguised Odysseus, and throws a footstool at him in Chapter 17. He is the first to die in Chapter 22 — Odysseus shoots him through the throat as he is raising a wine cup. The poem grants him no clemency.

The second-in-command of the suitors. More polished than Antinous, more diplomatic, no less destructive. When the slaughter begins he tries to negotiate; Odysseus ignores him. He is the second suitor to die.

The best-mannered of the suitors. Odysseus, in disguise, warns him in Chapter 18 to leave the palace before its master returns; he does not listen. Athena has marked him for death along with the rest. He is the closest the poem comes to suggesting that any of the suitors might have been spared.

Odysseus's goatherd, who has thrown his lot in with the suitors. He insults the disguised Odysseus and, during the slaughter, tries to bring weapons to the suitors. The way he is dealt with at the end of Chapter 22 is one of the more grimly explicit moments in classical literature.

The aged king of Pylos, one of the few major Greek heroes from the Trojan War to come home cleanly. Telemachus visits him in Chapter 3. Nestor tells stories — long ones — and his account of Agamemnon's homecoming becomes a quiet warning that runs through the rest of the poem.

Helen's husband, the king of Sparta, brother of Agamemnon. He receives Telemachus in Chapter 4 and tells the strange story of his own homecoming — including how he wrestled the sea-god Proteus to learn that Odysseus was alive on Calypso's island. His marriage with Helen has a complicated, settled-over-time quality you don't get in most ancient texts.

The most famous woman of the ancient world, returned to Sparta after the Trojan War. The poem treats her with a strange composure: she remembers Troy clearly, performs the role of perfect hostess, and in Chapter 4 drops a pharmacological drug into the wine to ease everyone's grief. Reading her here, you realize the Iliad and Odyssey are stranger about her than later moralizing has suggested.

The king of Scheria, the magical seafaring island where Odysseus washes up at the start of his telling. Alcinous and his queen Arete extend perfect hospitality (xenia) — the moral standard against which every other host in the poem is judged. The Phaeacians' magic ships eventually return Odysseus home.

Alcinous's queen, and in some ways the more impressive of the two. Odysseus is told to throw himself at her knees, not the king's, when he enters the palace — her judgement is the one that matters. She recognizes the clothes Nausicaa has given him and asks the question Odysseus has to answer carefully to protect the princess. He passes.

Alcinous and Arete's daughter, who finds the shipwrecked Odysseus on the beach in Chapter 6. The poem treats their meeting with extraordinary delicacy: she is interested in him, he is gentle, neither overstays. She slips out of the poem after directing him to her father's palace. One of literature's first portraits of an ordinary girl glimpsing an extraordinary stranger.

The court singer at Alcinous's palace. In Chapter 8 he sings of the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles before Troy, and Odysseus weeps. Then he sings of the wooden horse and the fall of Troy, at Odysseus's own request, and Odysseus weeps again. Homer is, among other things, putting himself into his own poem here — Demodocus is blind, as Homer was said to be, and Odysseus's tears are a portrait of how Homer hoped his audience would feel.

A fugitive seer Telemachus picks up at Pylos and brings back to Ithaca. He turns out to be the only mortal in the great hall who can read the omens — in Chapter 20 he sees the walls running with blood and the suitors' faces becoming the faces of dead men, and tells them so. They laugh and drive him from the hall. He is one of the poem's eerier minor figures.

The blind seer Odysseus visits Hades to consult, on Circe's instruction. He prophesies the rest of Odysseus's journey — including the strange final task: to walk inland with an oar until someone mistakes it for a winnowing-fan, and to die a peaceful death "from the sea."

Odysseus's mother, whom he meets among the dead in Chapter 11 and learns for the first time has died — of grief, waiting for him. He tries three times to embrace her, and three times she slips through his arms like smoke. One of the most piercing scenes in the poem.

Leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, murdered on his return by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover. His ghost speaks bitterly to Odysseus in Hades and warns him not to trust any woman. The contrast between Agamemnon's homecoming and Odysseus's runs through the whole poem — Penelope is the answer to Clytemnestra.

The hero of the Iliad, killed at Troy. Odysseus meets his ghost in Hades and tries to comfort him: surely it is great to be honored among the dead? Achilles's reply — that he would rather be a slave to a poor farmer above ground than king of all the dead — is one of the most famous lines in Western literature, and a quiet rebuke to the heroic ethos his other poem celebrated.

The most active divine character in the poem. She is Odysseus's protector, plot architect, and frequent disguise-partner. She appears as Mentes (Chapter 1), as Mentor (Books 2 and 22), as a young shepherd (Chapter 13), and in her own form for major recognitions. The poem's plot is, in several senses, her plan.

The sea-god, father of the Cyclops Polyphemus. He hates Odysseus for the blinding and spends most of the poem absent at a feast among the Ethiopians. When he finally notices Odysseus's escape from Calypso in Chapter 5, he wrecks his raft. He is the divine engine of the poem's obstacles.

The king of the gods, mostly a quiet authority in the Odyssey. He approves Athena's plan to rescue Odysseus, sends Hermes to Calypso, and intervenes at moments of escalation. Less central than in the Iliad, but the final arbiter when the others disagree.

The errand-runner of Olympus. He brings Zeus's order to Calypso (Chapter 5), guides the souls of the dead suitors to Hades (Chapter 24), and gives Odysseus the herb moly as protection against Circe's magic (Chapter 10). One of the few gods who acts on the human plane and seems to enjoy doing so.

The nymph who has held Odysseus on her remote island for seven years. She loves him; he wants to go home. When Hermes orders her to release him in Chapter 5, she does — bitterly, with one of the poem's most pointed protests at the double standard the male gods apply to female ones.

The witch who turns Odysseus's men into pigs in Chapter 10. With Hermes's help (and a herb called moly), Odysseus forces her to restore them. He then ends up sharing her bed for a year. She gives him crucial advice for the journey ahead, including the instruction to visit the dead.

The sun-god, owner of the sacred cattle that Odysseus's men slaughter and eat in Chapter 12 despite explicit warnings. Helios threatens to take his light into Hades unless Zeus punishes them; Zeus does, destroying their ship. Odysseus alone survives.

The god of the winds, who lives on a floating island. In Chapter 10 he gives Odysseus a tied-up bag containing all the contrary winds, leaving only a fair wind toward Ithaca. Within sight of home, Odysseus's men open the bag, thinking it is gold; the winds blow them all the way back to Aeolus, who refuses to help a second time.

The one-eyed giant whose blinding in Chapter 9 is the most famous episode of the poem. Odysseus and his men are trapped in his cave; Odysseus introduces himself only as Outis ("Nobody"), gets the Cyclops drunk on strong wine, and blinds him with a sharpened olive-stake. When the other Cyclopes hear Polyphemus shouting "Nobody is killing me!" they ignore him. The escape is famous; the long-term cost is Poseidon's wrath.

Two female creatures (in later art a flock of them) whose song is so beautiful that any sailor who hears it will leap into the sea to reach them and drown. Odysseus passes them in Chapter 12 by stopping his crew's ears with wax and tying himself to the mast — so he alone hears the song and lives. The most famous engineering trick in classical literature.

A six-headed sea-monster who lives on a cliff above a narrow strait. Each head has three rows of teeth and an appetite for one passing sailor at a time. In Chapter 12 Odysseus is forced to choose between Scylla, who will take exactly six of his men, and Charybdis, who might take the whole ship. He chooses Scylla and watches the six men die screaming his name.

A vast whirlpool on the opposite side of the same strait as Scylla. Three times a day she sucks the sea down to the bottom and three times spits it back; any ship caught in her is lost with all hands. Odysseus survives a second encounter with her later in Chapter 12 by clinging to the branches of a fig tree growing out of the cliff above her.

An island people in Chapter 9 whose staple food is the fruit of the lotus. Odysseus's scouts eat it and lose all desire to go home; he has to drag them back to the ships in tears and tie them under the rowing benches. The first of the supernatural temptations on the journey, and the one that sets the poem's larger problem: the lure of giving up.

A race of giants who lure Odysseus's twelve-ship fleet into a sheltered harbor in Chapter 10 and then pelt the ships with boulders from the cliffs above, sinking eleven of them. The least famous and most catastrophic of the early monsters — Odysseus's losses here are larger than at any point before. Only his own ship escapes.