The Odyssey

Characters · The Odyssey

The cast — who they are, and what they carry.

1. 01

   Odysseus

   Protagonist, king of Ithaca

   The most human of the Greek heroes, because he is the one who wants to stop being a hero. Achilles chooses a short glorious life; Odysseus turns down eternal youth to get back to a wife who has aged and a farm he can smell. He is brave but rarely first into a fight, and he wins almost everything by thinking. He is also vain, quick to anger, a fluent and habitual liar, and responsible through pure ego for the death of every man who followed him out of Troy. Homer holds all of that in one character without ever asking us to pick a verdict. His defining scene is not the killing of the suitors but sitting on Calypso's beach, weeping at the horizon, with immortality on offer behind him.

2. 02

   Penelope

   Wife of Odysseus, queen of Ithaca

   Not a symbol of patience, whatever the tradition says. Penelope is running a twenty-year holding action against a house full of armed men with no army and no authority, and she does it with the same weapon her husband uses: deception. The shroud she weaves and unpicks each night buys her three years. When Odysseus finally stands in front of her she does what nobody else in the poem dares to do to him, which is refuse to believe. She tests him with the bed and watches him fail to control his temper, and only then accepts him. She is the only character who out-thinks Odysseus, and the poem seems entirely aware of it.

3. 03

   Telemachus

   Son of Odysseus

   He begins the poem as a young man sulking in a corner of a house he is supposed to own, and the first four books are essentially his education. Athena pushes him into calling an assembly he cannot win and taking a voyage he does not need, and both fail in practical terms while succeeding entirely in what they were for. He comes back able to keep a secret, hold a weapon, and stand beside his father in the hall. He is also given one of the poem's coldest moments, ordering the hanging of the servant women, which suggests the education was not only in courage.

4. 04

   Athena

   Goddess of wisdom, Odysseus's patron

   The most active god in the poem and the one who most enjoys her favourite mortal. She likes Odysseus specifically because he lies as well as she does; their reunion on the Ithacan beach is two professionals admiring each other's technique. She engineers almost every turn of the plot, and this raises a real question about how much credit Odysseus is owed. She is also the poem's emergency brake: when the revenge cycle threatens to run forever in the final book, no human solution exists and she simply stops it.

5. 05

   Polyphemus

   The Cyclops, son of Poseidon

   More than a monster. He is a deliberate portrait of a society without any of the rules the poem cares about: no assemblies, no agriculture, no laws, and above all no hospitality, since his idea of receiving guests is to eat them. He is also, briefly, pitiable. Blinded, he talks to his favourite ram and cannot understand why it is walking last. His curse is the mechanism that drives the entire remaining plot.

6. 06

   Circe

   Enchantress of Aeaea

   She turns men into pigs, which is either a magical threat or an unusually direct comment on what happens to sailors given food, drink and no purpose. Once Odysseus resists her she becomes an ally, a lover, and the source of the practical instructions that get him through the underworld, the Sirens and Scylla. He stays with her for a year, which the poem records without comment and which sits awkwardly beside the loyalty it demands of Penelope.

7. 07

   Calypso

   Nymph of Ogygia

   She holds Odysseus for seven years and offers him the one thing no other character in Greek myth is offered and refuses: immortality, permanent youth, and her. She is not cruel, and she is genuinely wounded when ordered to release him, pointing out that male gods take mortal lovers freely. Her function is to make the poem's central choice explicit. Given the option of ceasing to be human, Odysseus says no.

8. 08

   Eumaeus

   Swineherd

   A slave who was born a prince, kidnapped as a child, and sold. He owns almost nothing and gives the disguised Odysseus the best food he has before asking a single question. Homer keeps setting him next to the suitors, who have everything and take more, and the comparison does all the moral work without a word of commentary. He is the poem's clearest statement that hospitality is a matter of character rather than wealth.

9. 09

   Antinous

   Leading suitor

   The most arrogant of the men occupying the palace and the one who plans the ambush on Telemachus. He throws a stool at a beggar in a house that is not his, which in this poem is close to a death sentence on its own. He is the first man Odysseus shoots, in the throat, mid-drink, and the poem gives him no dignity in dying.

10. 10

    Eurycleia

    Old nurse

    She nursed Odysseus as a baby and recognises him by touch, finding the boar scar while washing a beggar's feet. It is one of the great recognition scenes in literature and it lasts seconds before he grabs her throat to keep her quiet. She is loyal to the point of eagerness, and Odysseus has to stop her cheering over the bodies of the dead, telling her it is not right to gloat over killed men.