Odysseus the Hero
The Homeric Hero
In the world of the Odyssey, a hero is not simply a good person. A hero is someone who achieves great deeds, wins lasting fame, and earns the respect — and fear — of other men. The Homeric concept of heroism is built around two Greek values: kleos (glory) and time (honour). A hero’s kleos is the fame that survives his death, passed on in the songs of bards. His time is the honour shown to him by his community — gifts, prestige, the right to speak first at an assembly. To lose time is a devastating blow; to win kleos is the highest aspiration.
The Iliad, Homer’s other poem, presents the ideal of the warrior-hero most clearly in Achilles: the greatest fighter, whose wrath drives the whole story, who chooses a short glorious life over a long quiet one. Odysseus, by contrast, is a different kind of hero. He is brave and strong, but his defining virtue is intelligence, not brute strength. This creates a fascinating tension: is the cleverest man always the best hero? The Odyssey argues yes — and the prescribed books are Homer’s case for that argument.
Kleos (glory/fame) and time (honour) are the two central heroic values in Homeric epic. Kleos is the lasting fame a hero earns through great deeds — it lives on after death in poetry and song. Time is the immediate respect shown by a community. Losing either is a catastrophe; winning both is the ultimate aspiration.
Odysseus as Leader, Husband and Father
The Odyssey tests Odysseus’s heroism across three roles simultaneously. As a leader, he is responsible for the lives of his crew. He plans carefully, issues orders, and holds his men together in the face of terrifying obstacles. Yet his leadership is not always flawless: his men die, largely because they cannot match his self-restraint. In Book 12, they eat the sacred cattle of the sun god Helios, despite Odysseus’s explicit warnings. They are destroyed as a result. Odysseus’s failure as a leader is that he cannot always prevent his men from being their own worst enemy.
As a husband, Odysseus’s devotion to Penelope is the emotional core of the poem. He refuses the offer of immortality from the goddess Calypso, who holds him on her island for seven years, because he would rather be a mortal man with a wife and a home than an immortal without them. This choice is central to the poem’s values: Odysseus knows what he is and what he values. The home, the marriage bed, the kingdom — these are worth more to him than divine status.
As a father, his relationship with Telemachus is one of the poem’s most moving dimensions. Telemachus is twenty years old; he has grown up without a father. The poem traces his development from a boy who cannot challenge the suitors into a young man who fights alongside his father in Book 22. This growth is partly Athena’s work, but it is also inspired by Odysseus’s own example: when Telemachus sees what his father can do, he finds the courage to act.
Greek epic contrasts two kinds of heroic power. Bie (raw physical force) is the value of Achilles or Heracles — overwhelming strength that defeats enemies directly. Metis (cunning intelligence) is Odysseus’s value — the ability to solve a problem indirectly, through deception, disguise or verbal skill. The Odyssey is, in one sense, a sustained argument that metis is at least as valuable as bie — perhaps more so, since the challenges Odysseus faces cannot be defeated by strength alone.
The Cyclops episode is the clearest example. Polyphemus is vastly stronger than Odysseus and his men. Physical force would be useless. Only metis — the Nobody trick, the stake, the rams — can save them. Similarly, in Book 22 Odysseus does not defeat over a hundred suitors by physical prowess alone: he needs the element of surprise, a secured door, and the help of Athena. The poem suggests that a hero who knows when to use cunning and when to use strength is greater than one who can only do the latter.
The Flaws of Odysseus
Odysseus is not a perfect hero. His most prominent flaw, seen most clearly in the Cyclops episode, is excessive pride — what the Greeks called hubris. After escaping from Polyphemus, Odysseus cannot resist revealing his real name. The boast is humanly understandable — he has just achieved something extraordinary — but it is disastrous in its consequences, setting Poseidon against him for the rest of the poem. A truly wise hero would have stayed silent.
Odysseus also shows a capacity for ruthlessness that can disturb modern readers. He lies freely, to almost everyone he encounters. He shows very little grief for the men he loses. He kills the suitors without giving even the most innocent a chance to escape. Homer does not present these as straightforward virtues; the poem invites the reader to think hard about what kind of man Odysseus is, and whether his ends justify his means. This moral complexity is part of what makes the Odyssey worth studying.
Odysseus’s two most important flaws are pride (hubris — revealed by the boast to Polyphemus, which costs him Poseidon’s enmity) and his capacity for deception (he lies even to loyal characters, including Penelope in Book 19, though this is also what enables his survival). These flaws complicate his heroism without cancelling it.
One of the qualities Homer most praises in Odysseus is endurance — the ability to bear suffering without breaking. This is called karteria. Odysseus weeps for his home regularly, but he never gives up. He endures Calypso’s island for seven years without losing his sense of who he is. He sits in his own palace disguised as a beggar, being mocked and humiliated by the suitors, without revealing himself. This sustained self-control — knowing when to act and when to wait — is what ultimately wins him everything he wants.
This makes Odysseus a quite different kind of hero from Achilles, whose defining choice is to act immediately and violently when his honour is threatened. Odysseus chooses patience over pride (except in the Cyclops episode), strategy over impulse. Whether this makes him a more admirable figure than Achilles is a question the poem raises but does not simply answer — and that open question is ideal material for an essay.
Odysseus’s Relationship with Athena
Throughout the Odyssey, Athena is Odysseus’s protector and closest divine ally. She intervenes at almost every critical moment: she inspires Telemachus to seek news of his father, she engineers Odysseus’s release from Calypso’s island by appealing to Zeus, she gives Odysseus his beggar’s disguise, and she tips the balance of the battle in Book 22. Their relationship is explicitly described as a friendship of equals in intellect: Athena tells Odysseus that she favours him because he is “the cleverest of mortals,” just as she is the cleverest of the gods. This mutual recognition of metis — goddess and man bonded by their shared love of craft and cunning — is one of the most charming ideas in the poem.