Odysseus
“complicated man” · “man of twists and turns” · “skilled in all ways of contending” · “man of many ways”
Homer's Odysseus is admirable and appalling in the same breath, and every adaptation has to choose which half it believes. The poem's first word is man; its first description of him is polytropos, a word that means both much-traveled and much-turning, a man of many tricks. He wins the Trojan War with a hollow horse, blinds a Cyclops after telling the giant his name is Nobody, and lies his way out of a dozen deaths with stories so good that the goddess Athena keeps him around for the pleasure of them. He is also the only man on his ships to reach home. Every one of his crew dies on the way. That is the tension the whole tradition inherits. His cunning saves him, and it is a liar's talent. His endurance is heroic, and the homecoming he endures for ends in the killing of a hundred and eight suitors and the hanging of twelve enslaved women. Homer holds both readings at once and never resolves them. Each version below picks: his cleverness as heroism, or as the thing that lets him survive what he does; the man who gets home, or the cost of getting there.
Is Wilson's Odysseus sympathetic?
Wilson bets the whole man on one word. Where older translators reached for wily or much-enduring, she calls Odysseus complicated, a word that withholds the verdict and hands it to you. Her English is plain and exact, so his lies read as lies and his violence keeps its cost; nothing is softened into euphemism. She is the first woman to publish an English Odyssey, and she refuses the old habit of calling the enslaved women maids or servants, which means the hanging at the end lands as a killing rather than housekeeping. Her Odysseus is neither excused nor condemned. He is left complicated, on purpose, for the reader to weigh.
In the Robert Fagles translation
Fagles plays him as the thriller hero. His polytropos is “the man of twists and turns,” where the twists are maneuvers, moves Odysseus makes rather than moral knots he is caught in. The translation was built to be read aloud, and Ian McKellen's audiobook is the proof; it favors speed and drama over second-guessing. This is the least self-interrogating Odysseus of the four major translations, and that is a choice worth respecting: it trusts the hero's forward drive to carry the poem and lets the harder questions about him sit in the reader's peripheral vision while the story keeps moving.
Read the full take on The Robert Fagles Translation (1996) →
In the Robert Fitzgerald translation
Fitzgerald's “skilled in all ways of contending” turns the cunning into a fighter's range and renders it as music. His is the most self-consciously literary of the mid-century translations, and for decades it was the standard American classroom text, so it is the Odysseus a couple of generations met first. The character arrives filtered through a lyric ear: you hear his versatility before you weigh it. Fitzgerald makes the man beautiful, and beauty is its own argument about someone whose defining trait is that he can talk his way into and out of anything.
Read the full take on The Robert Fitzgerald Translation (1961) →
In the Richmond Lattimore translation
Lattimore gives the most literal Odysseus: “the man of many ways,” the closest English to polytropos without smoothing. He preserves Greek word order, the epithets, and a long six-beat line, sometimes at the cost of easy reading, which is why scholars assign it. The effect on the character is that Lattimore editorializes least. He hands you the ambiguity intact and steps back, so his Odysseus is the one who stays closest to the untranslated original, with the judgment about him left entirely to you.
Read the full take on The Richmond Lattimore Translation (1965) →
In Christopher Nolan's 2026 film
Nolan's Odysseus is a soldier wrecked by what he did to get home. The film keeps Matt Damon's all-American decency on screen just long enough to trust him, withholding his face until the moment he saves his old dog Argos, and then takes it apart, revealing in the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn's summary a thief, a liar, a colonizer, and a killer. The guilt is the center of gravity. In an invented scene he confesses to Penelope that he broke the sacred laws of hospitality, killed innocents at Troy, and desecrated Athena's shrine, and the film treats these as wounds he carries home rather than feats. The famous cunning is deliberately muted. The Cyclops is played as body-horror instead of the Nobody word-trick, and reviewers split on whether losing the wit is a bold reading or the adaptation's central miss. What replaces it is closer to Nolan's other haunted men than to Homer's grinning trickster, the survivor who did terrible things for a reason and cannot put them down.
Read the full take on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) →
In O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Ulysses Everett McGill keeps Odysseus's cunning and drops his stakes. He is a fast-talking con man who breaks off a chain gang on a lie about buried treasure, and his defining vanity is his hair, which he sleeps in a net to keep set. The Coens map the myth's skeleton onto Depression-era Mississippi: a long road home, a wife (Penny) with a suitor lined up, a one-eyed Bible salesman for the Cyclops, sirens as river washerwomen, a blind prophet on a railway handcar. The gods are gone, swapped for luck and the radio, and the flood that saves everyone is a deus ex machina with no deus behind it. Everett's polytropos is pure patter. He is never in real danger and never quite grows, which is the joke: the cleverness that meant survival in Homer is, here, a man in love with the sound of his own voice.
Why doesn't Odysseus want to come home in The Return?
Fiennes plays the homecoming with the hero scraped off. His Odysseus washes up on Ithaca as a gaunt, bearded beggar who does not especially want to be there; the film's quiet devastation is that home is the thing he dreads, because arriving means his wife and son will have to look at the man the war made. He keeps the beggar's disguise to move through his own palace, watching the suitors under Antinous waste his household, saying almost nothing. The fantasy is deleted entirely, no Cyclops, no Circe, no Olympus, so nothing distracts from the damage. What Homer's Odysseus carries as cunning, Fiennes carries as dread and shame over the men he led to their deaths. The reunion with Penelope is no triumph, just two scarred people deciding whether they can stand to know each other again.
In the 1997 NBC miniseries
Armand Assante plays it straight and means it. The 1997 miniseries is the one version that treats the whole journey as a sincere adventure, monsters and gods and all, with no irony and no revisionist angle. Athena is practically a co-star, arguing his fate on screen the way she does in the poem. Assante's Odysseus is a swashbuckler whose cunning reads as bravado and resourcefulness rather than moral weight, and the signature image is him against the Cyclops, outmatched and out-thinking it. It is comfort-food mythology, dated the way 1990s television is dated, and it matters here as the unironic baseline. The sadder, guiltier Odysseus of The Return and Nolan's film is a reaction against exactly this, the hero told with a full heart and no second thoughts.
In EPIC: The Musical
EPIC gives Odysseus an actual arc, the thing the poem only implies. He starts merciful, reluctant to kill and agonizing over a single lost man, and chooses, decision by decision, to become ruthless enough to get home. The hinge is Poseidon's line that ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves, delivered after the god reveals that the blinded Cyclops was his son. From there Odysseus hardens. He kills the sirens he once would have outwitted, sacrifices his own men to Scylla, and reaches home colder than he left. Where Homer presents a finished character and leaves you to infer the cost, the musical dramatizes the becoming and puts it on stage in every song. It is one adaptation's answer to the poem's oldest question, what surviving turns you into.
In Circe by Madeline Miller
From Circe's island, the great man shrinks. Miller's Odysseus arrives on Aiaia as one episode in a life that spans centuries, and the novel watches his legend wear thin up close: charming, dangerous, restless, tired. Circe sees the cunning and also what it costs him, the wariness that never switches off, the violence he carries like luggage. He leaves, as men do in her story, and the fatherhood he leaves behind, a son named Telegonus, sets up the death Homer never tells. The diminishment is the book's whole argument: the men told the Odyssey, and the women it passed through had their own lives running before he arrived and after he sailed. Here, he is a single chapter in her story rather than the other way around.
In Ulysses by James Joyce
Joyce dissolves Odysseus into an ordinary man having an ordinary day. Leopold Bloom, an ad canvasser wandering Dublin on 16 June 1904, is the hero recast as a decent, unheroic everyman, and the whole Odyssey runs underneath his Tuesday as a hidden scaffold: eighteen episodes shadow Homer, with Bloom as Odysseus, Stephen Dedalus as Telemachus, and Molly as Penelope. Bloom's cunning is tact and kindness; his Cyclops is a bar-room nationalist he faces down with a mild joke; his great homecoming is climbing into bed beside a wife he knows has been unfaithful and choosing tenderness anyway. The book's bet is that heroism moved, out of the myths and into the endurance of getting through a normal day without cruelty. Odysseus survives in Joyce as the shape of a life, visible only if you know to look for it.
In Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
Inman is Odysseus with the cunning stripped and only the endurance left. A wounded Confederate deserter, he walks home across a wrecked South to the woman waiting for him, Ada, meeting his own versions of Circe and the Cyclops in the desperate people along the road. There are no gods and no tricks to save him; Frazier grounds the myth in hard historical fact, where the war is the only fate on offer and walking is the only plan. What carries over from Homer is the endurance, the much-suffering patience, the refusal to stop moving toward home. What does not carry over is any guarantee that the homecoming will be granted. The novel splits its attention between his road and Ada's work holding the farm, which makes it, like the poem, as much about the one who waits as the one who returns.
In the Gareth Hinds graphic novel
Hinds draws the Odysseus you can read in a face. His graphic novel tells the whole poem faithfully, pulling from several translations, and the medium does the interior work that prose leaves to the reader: you see the calculation in his expression, the disguises, the flicker before a lie. The monsters and the wine-dark sea are painted in watercolor and ink, and Odysseus is rendered as a weathered, particular man rather than a marble hero. It is the closest thing to a visual translation, and its argument is quiet, that a story composed to be performed and pictured belongs on the page as images, where his cunning is something you watch cross his face.
Read the full take on The Odyssey — Gareth Hinds (graphic novel) →
In Hades II
In Hades II the great strategist is dead, and he coaches from the afterlife. Odysseus turns up as a resident of the Crossroads, a deceased mentor lending his tactics to Melinoë's war against the Titan Chronos, alongside Hecate and Nemesis. He is amiable here, an uncle more than a legend, and the game lets you deepen the relationship the way it does with any character: gifts of nectar, conversations that unlock over dozens of runs, a keepsake called the Knuckle Bones you can carry into battle. It is a cameo, not a lead, and the framing is the interesting part. Supergiant casts Odysseus as the man who already lived the hero's journey and survived it, and is good for advice between runs.
Common questions
Is Odysseus a hero or a villain?
Both, and Homer refuses to choose. The cunning that saves him is a liar's talent, his survival costs the lives of every man who sailed with him, and his homecoming ends in a massacre. The modern versions split along that seam: Nolan's 2026 film and The Return read him as a war survivor carrying his guilt home, EPIC dramatizes his choice to become ruthless, and the four major translations keep the ambiguity alive in a single word, polytropos.
What does polytropos mean?
It is the Greek epithet in the first line of the Odyssey, literally “many-turned” or “much-turning,” meaning both well-traveled and full of tricks. Each translation renders it differently, and the choice is already an interpretation: Wilson's “complicated man,” Fagles's “man of twists and turns,” Fitzgerald's “skilled in all ways of contending,” Lattimore's “man of many ways.” Four English Odysseuses out of one Greek word.
How does Odysseus die?
Not in the Odyssey, which ends with him alive on Ithaca. The oldest answer comes from a lost sequel, the Telegony: Telegonus, his son by the witch Circe, sails to Ithaca and kills his father by accident with a spear tipped by a stingray's barb, the prophesied death out of the sea. Only a summary of that poem survives, recorded by the ancient scholar Proclus.
Is Nolan's Odysseus accurate to the Odyssey?
It follows the events closely and departs from the tone on purpose. The 2026 film foregrounds guilt and war trauma and mutes the wit that Homer prized, playing Odysseus as a haunted soldier rather than a grinning trickster. Reviewers divide on whether that is a bold reading or the adaptation's main weakness. To check it against the source, any full translation works; Emily Wilson's is the most readable place to start.
Which Odysseus is yours? Take the quiz →
Keep exploring: all 17 Odysseys · the translations compared
One more, off to the side: Tennyson's 1833 poem “Ulysses” is the only text here spoken by Odysseus himself. Old, home, and restless, he finds Ithaca too small and plans one last voyage into the dark, “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” It is a hidden door on this site rather than a main entry, but it is worth the knock: the character, at the end of everything, in his own voice.