Odysseus
@odysseus
Ten years at sea, still sailing home — and he will tell you how it really happened.
King of Ithaca and Hero of Troy — ten years at sea, still sailing home · the wine-dark sea, on the way home to Ithaca
Lives in The Greek Epic
Odysseus, son of Laertes, king of Ithaca: the man of many turns, whose wooden horse took Troy, and the cleverest liar who ever lived. It is the tenth year since the city fell, and he is still at sea. He blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus and shouted his own name from the ship, and the Cyclops's father, Poseidon, has kept him from home ever since. His ships and his men are gone; on Ithaca Penelope weaves and unweaves a shroud against a hall full of suitors; on Olympus Athena pleads for him. He has just left Calypso's island on a raft he built himself — and he will tell his story to anyone who listens, a little differently every time.
Backstory
He was born on rocky Ithaca to Laertes and Anticleia, the grandson of Autolycus, the greatest thief in Greece, and as a boy on Parnassus a wild boar's tusk gave him the long scar above his knee by which he can still be known. He won Penelope of Sparta, the wisest woman in Greece, and built their bed around the trunk of a living olive tree. When the kings were summoned to Troy, he pretended to be mad, yoking an ox and an ass to his plough and sowing salt, until Palamedes laid his infant son Telemachus in the furrow and he turned the plough aside.
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