Odysseus Is a Hero Who Has to Be Recognised

People describe the Odyssey as an adventure, and on the surface it is. There is a one-eyed giant, a witch who turns men into pigs, a sea monster with six heads, an island of singing women. But if you read the poem the way I now do, it stops looking like a travel story and starts looking like an examination. Over and over, someone has to decide whether the man in front of them really is Odysseus. He passes some of the tests, fails others, and the whole thing is built so that the final proof is not strength or cleverness. It is a secret that only two people in the world know. I think that is the poem's real subject, and it explains an awful lot about why Odysseus behaves the way he does.

The man who cannot stay hidden

Start with the Cyclops, because it is the best-known scene and it contains the whole character in miniature. Odysseus is trapped in the cave of Polyphemus, and he does something clever. When the giant asks his name, he says it is Nobody. The Greek pun is Outis. Later, when Odysseus has blinded him with a burning stake and the other Cyclopes come running to ask who is hurting him, Polyphemus shouts that Nobody is. They shrug and go back to bed.

It is a brilliant trick. And then Odysseus ruins it. As his ship pulls away from shore, he cannot help himself. He stands up and shouts his real name, his father's name and his home, so that Polyphemus will know exactly who beat him. His crew beg him to be quiet. He does it anyway, and the giant prays to his father Poseidon, and that curse is what keeps Odysseus at sea for ten more years.

I find that moment remarkable. Here is the most careful man in Greek literature, who hides his name for survival, and he throws the secret away because being unknown stings more than being cursed. The Greeks had a word for what he wanted, kleos, which is roughly reputation, the story that people tell about you after you leave. For Odysseus, the problem is that his two great skills pull in opposite directions. Disguise keeps him alive. Fame makes him who he is. The poem is mostly the story of him learning to live with both.

The twenty years problem

By the time Odysseus gets home, he has been gone twenty years, ten at Troy and ten wandering. He has not been recognised by anyone for most of that time, and he is, now, truly unrecognisable. Athena makes him look like an old beggar, which is useful, but the poem is also clear that twenty years would change a man anyway. The question of who he is becomes practical. Who still knows him? What counts as evidence?

The answer arrives in a series of small scenes, and I think they are the best writing in the poem.

The first one is the dog. In book seventeen, Odysseus is walking toward his own house as a beggar, and he sees an old hound lying on a heap of dung, neglected and covered in ticks. The dog is Argos, whom Odysseus trained as a puppy before leaving. Argos lifts his head, wags his tail, tries to come closer and cannot. Odysseus, passing, wipes away a tear and says nothing, because he cannot risk it. Then Argos dies. The poem says he saw Odysseus again after twenty years and then death took him.

It is so small, and nobody else in the scene notices. A dog recognises him purely by instinct. No scar, no proof, just being known by something that cannot be argued with. You could read the whole poem as a search for that kind of recognition.

The second is the scar. In book nineteen, the old nurse Eurycleia, who raised him, washes the beggar's feet and sees a scar on his thigh. It was made by a boar when he was a young man hunting on Parnassus, visiting his grandfather Autolycus. She drops his foot, the basin spills, and Odysseus clamps his hand over her mouth and tells her that if she speaks, he will have to kill her even though she nursed him. There is a lovely detail here: the poem stops mid-scene to tell the whole story of how he got the scar, as though the object itself deserves a biography. A scar, in this world, is a document.

Proof by violence, and proof by secret

The suitors, of course, do not recognise him at all, and that is why the contest of the bow works. Penelope proposes that whoever can string Odysseus's great bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe heads will marry her. None of them can bend it. The beggar asks to try. They mock him. He strings it with no effort and sends the arrow through the axes.

That is a form of identification too. He is proving himself through the one skill nobody else in the house has, and then he turns the bow on them. People often point to that scene as the climax, and it is dramatic, but notice what has not happened yet. He has shown who he is to the men he is about to kill, and to the household servants, and to his son. Penelope has not agreed that he is Odysseus. She has not stepped out of the room.

The bed

This is the best part, and it is the one I would most like more people to read. After the slaughter, Eurycleia runs upstairs to tell Penelope that her husband is home. Penelope does not run down. She is polite, she is wary, and she says things that sound almost cold. She tells herself that one of the gods may have killed the suitors in disguise. She goes down, sits across from him in the firelight, and says very little. Telemachus is furious with her for her coldness. Odysseus smiles and says leave her be, she will know me better in time.

Then she tests him. She tells the nurse to move the great bed out of the bedroom for the stranger. Odysseus loses his temper. He says that is impossible, because the bed cannot be moved. He built it himself around the living trunk of an olive tree that grew in the courtyard, cut the tree into a bedpost, and built the room around it. Nobody could move that bed without cutting through the trunk.

Only the two of them knew. That is the entire point of the trick. Penelope has been waiting, for twenty years, with a lock that only one key can open, and it is not a weapon or a scar that someone could have seen. It is a piece of their shared life. She breaks down, runs to him, and the poem compares her to a shipwrecked sailor seeing land.

What I take from this is that Penelope is playing the same game her husband is. They are two people who survive by checking what others know, and the marriage is the one place where each of them can be sure. If Odysseus is the man of many turns, Penelope is a woman who has been turning for twenty years too. She unpicks her weaving every night so the suitors cannot force her to choose. The poem does not make her wait passively. It makes her his equal at the one skill he is proudest of.

What he gives up

Look at what Odysseus chooses along the way. On the island of Calypso, the nymph offers him immortality and a place beside her forever. He turns it down, politely and firmly, because he wants to go home to a wife who will grow old. The Greek hero who rejects deathlessness is rare. Later, in the Underworld, he meets Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Iliad, who tells him that he would rather be a labourer on earth, working for a poor man, than king of all the dead. That is the Iliad's hero saying that the glory he died for was not worth it.

Put these two together and you see the shape. The Iliad is about people who choose to be remembered and pay with their lives. The Odyssey is about a man who chooses to live, and then has to rebuild his own existence from scratch. The reputation he wanted at the Cyclops is something he has learned to hold more loosely by the time he gets back. In the last books, he is at his most careful. He tests his own father Laertes before revealing himself. He lies to people who might have loved him, and he is a little ashamed of it, and the poem lets him be.

One more journey

There is an odd note at the end that I think confirms all this. In the Underworld, the seer Tiresias tells Odysseus that once he has killed the suitors, he must take an oar and walk inland until he meets people who have never heard of the sea, who will look at the oar and ask why he is carrying a winnowing fan on his shoulder. There he must plant it in the ground and make a sacrifice to Poseidon.

Sit with that image. To finally be at peace, Odysseus has to find a place where nobody knows what he is. A place where the thing that defines him, the sea, is so foreign that people mistake his tool for something else. The man who couldn't resist telling the Cyclops his name ends his story by travelling to a country where he is nobody again, on purpose.

That is why I think of him as a hero who has to be recognised. Not in the sense of fame, though he loves that too, but in the quiet sense of being known by a dog, a nurse, a son, a wife, and in the end by no one. The poem's last lesson is that you can be known too well and too little, and the only person who can really tell is the one who holds the other half of your secret.