Odysseus (in ancient Greek Ὀδυσσεύς / Odusseús, in Latin Ulixes, then by deformation Ulysses) is one of the most famous heroes of Greek mythology. King of Ithaca, son of Laertes and Anticleia, he is married to Penelope, of whom he has a son, Telemachus. He is renowned for his mètis, this "cunning intelligence" which makes his advice very appreciated in the Trojan war in which he participates. It is again by the mètis that he distinguishes himself in the long journey he knows on the return from Troy, sung by Homer in his Odyssey.
In Pseudo-Apollodorus, who organizes the stories of Greek mythology into a globally coherent chronological whole, the death of Odysseus, announced by a prophecy, marks the end of the age of heroes, and therefore of the stories of classical mythology. . Odysseus is the central character of the Odyssey poem, to which he gives his name.
Etymology of the name of Ulysses
The name Odysseus exists in several forms in ancient Greek; we find for example:Ὀλυσσεύς / Olusseús, Ὀλυττεύς / Olutteús, Οὑδυσσεύς / Houdusseús; Οὐλιξεύς / Oulixeús and Οὐλίξης / Oulíxês. The Latin borrowing Ulixēs comes from this last form.
The etymology of the name is subject to discussion. Following Homer, the Petit Larousse des mythologies links it to the verb ὀδύσσομαι / odússomai (“to be irritated”, “to get angry”). Thus, in Canto XIX of the Odyssey, Autolycus is asked to choose a name for his newborn grandson, and declares:
“As I come here angry with many people,
men and women on the earth that feeds men,
May this child be called The Mad. »
But this late and conjectural etymology represents more a play on words than a real etymology. For his part, Paul Faure brings the Latin form Ulixēs closer to the Greek radical ολιγ- / olig- in the sense of small. Ultimately, it must be recognized that the name of Ulysses remains fundamentally unexplained.
Finally, the name of Odysseus gives rise to some derivatives:Ὀδυσσεία / Odusseía (the Odyssey), Ὀδὐσσειον / Odússeion (sanctuary of Odysseus) and Ὀλισσεῖδαι / Olisseîdai, name of a ppatriation in Argos etria.
Myth
Birth
Anticleia was raped by Sisyphus, who made her the mother of Odysseus, with whom she was pregnant when she married in Laertes. Anticleia, after having married Laertes, is taken to Alalcomènes, in Boeotia, where Odysseus is born.
The kingdom of Odysseus
Whenever Homer mentions the kingdom of Ulysses, he always names an archipelago made up of four islands, and which corresponds to the current archipelago of the Ionian Islands:Ithaca, Doulichion which can be identified with current Lefkada, Samé, today Kefalonia, and Zakynthos. Speaking of these islands, Odysseus specifies that they are “inhabited”, νῆσοι πολλαὶ ναιετάουσι, thus affirming that he exercises his political power over their people. Far from being reduced to the single island of Ithaca, the kingdom of Ulysses is therefore made up of a veritable Mediterranean basin delimited to the northeast by multiple islands and islets such as those today called Arkoudi, Meganisi, Oxia and the Echinades. The natural resources of these islands are specified:Ithaca and Doulichion produce wheat but also wine; Ithaca, "a good country for goats and pigs", experienced a prosperous breeding:Ulysses had a herd of several thousand animals, under the leadership of Eumeus, his chief swineherd, as well as several herdsmen and herdsmen.
The island also has forests, just like Zakynthos. When Télémaque draws up the catalog of the nobles who can claim the hand of Penelope, he gives a precious indication of the resources in men of these different components of the kingdom:from Doulichion came "fifty-two distinguished young people", while from Ithaca only twelve came. Ithaca thus appears the least rich, but the exploitation of the whole kingdom and the wealth drawn from trade and maritime expeditions allow its king to lead the way. Odysseus further asserts, "I dwell in Ithaca", thereby indicating that the political seat of his kingdom is on that island.
One of the heroes of the Iliad
When the Trojan War broke out, Odysseus, persuaded by the arguments of Menelaus and Agamemnon, left Ithaca to take part in the war in the Achaean camp - while a prophecy predicted a return strewn with pitfalls. According to other versions, he is bound by the oath of Tyndareus, obliging unfortunate suitors to the hand of Helen to help whoever wins. Odysseus, who has in the meantime married Penelope and does not want to leave his young son Telemachus, then simulates madness to avoid going to war, plowing a field with a team composed of an ox and a horse and sowing seed there. salt (or stones, depending on the version). The ruse is fanned by Palamède. Indeed, he will place Telemachus in the middle of the field that his father is plowing, who, so as not to hurt him, reveals his lucidity. Odysseus is forced to join the Greek camp. In the Iliad, he is represented as a wise king, favorite of Athena, and skillful orator; he took part in the war at the head of twelve ships. He therefore occupies a place of honor in the Council of Kings. The Council, on the other hand, stands, like the tribunal of war, before its ships, which are in the middle of the line formed by the Greek ships on the beach at Troy. It is therefore normal that the Greeks meet there, because it is a central point, both literally and figuratively, for sacrifices and legal decisions.
During one of these assemblies, he punishes the villager Thersites, who claims to dispute the word of the kings, by striking him with his baton of command. Considered trustworthy by the other kings, he is charged by Agamemnon to recover Briseis from Achilles, after having pleaded in vain with the latter entrenched in his tent. It is also he who is in charge of embassies:with Menelaus, he goes to Troy to negotiate the return of Helen, kidnapped by Paris. Friend of the young warrior Diomede, he accompanies him in the capture of the spy Dolon. According to a cyclical legend, they also both steal the Palladion.
After the death of Achilles, Odysseus defeats Ajax son of Telamon in a duel, and wins the arms of the Peleid. Finally, he is the author of the Trojan horse stratagem, mentioned in the Odyssey and the cyclical epics, among the first to go out to attack.
The hero of the Odyssey
With the Trojan War over, Odysseus wanders the sea after provoking the wrath of Poseidon. His wanderings include in particular the episode of the sirens pushing, thanks to their enchanting songs, the ships towards the reefs; Ulysses, warned by Circe, asks his crew to plug their ears with wax; as for him, he is tied to the mast of the boat because he wanted to listen to their song. In another episode, Ulysses fights against the cyclops named Polyphemus, a son of Poseidon, whose eye he gouges out with a stake after getting him drunk. The cyclops, wounded, throws huge rocks at Odysseus, which miss him and sink into the sea. Certain islets of the Ionian Sea were identified with these rocks. During new adventures, Odysseus meets the nymph Calypso who keeps him on her island for seven years and offers him immortality. He discovers the Lotophages people and also confronts the magician Circe, known for having the power to transform men into animals.
Ulysses goes to the country of the Cimmerians, who are, in the Odyssey, the Underworld or kingdom of Hades:this is the episode of the Nekuia. There he meets the wandering shadows of many heroes he has known:Agamemnon, Achilles who has become the king of the world of shadows, Ajax son of Telamon... After twenty years, when he returns to Ithaca, his homeland, in disguise while begging, he kills his wife Penelope's suitors and finds her and her son Telemachus.
Descent
In the Odyssey, Odysseus has only one son, Telemachus, whom he had by his wife Penelope. Hesiod's Theogony mentions two sons, Nausinoos and Nausithoos, born of the union between Odysseus and Calypso. Other sources give him other children:Telegonos, Agrios, Cassiphone and Latinos with Circe.
Death
Odysseus' death is not told in the Odyssey, which ends with his return to Ithaca, but the shadow of the seer Tiresias predicts to Odysseus that he will meet a sweet and happy death, which will come to him "from the sea” or will reach it “out of the sea”, depending on the meaning given to the preposition ἐξ.
On the other hand, the death of Odysseus is recounted in another epic of the Trojan Cycle, the Telegony, attributed to Eugammon of Cyrene, and of which we only know a very later summary attributed to the grammarian Proclos. According to the Telegony, Telegonos, son of Odysseus and Circe, traveled to Ithaca with some companions to know his father. Having been thrown on the shores of Ithaca without knowing him, he went to get food with his companions who gave themselves up to plunder. Odysseus, at the head of the inhabitants of Ithaca, came to repel these foreigners:there was a fight on the shore, and Telegonos struck Odysseus with a spear whose tip was made of a venomous stinger, thus fulfilling the prediction of Tiresias in the Odyssey. Odysseus, mortally wounded, then remembered an oracle who had warned him to beware of the hand of his son; he inquired about the identity of the stranger and his origin. He recognized Telegonos and died in his arms. Athena consoled them both, telling them that such was the order of fate:she even ordered Telegonus to marry Penelope and bring Odysseus's body to Circe to make her the honors of burial.
Interpretations
Xenophon's Ulysses
According to the Memoirs of Xenophon, Socrates, educating his followers in temperance in food and drink, says that it was by encouraging them to eat without hunger and drink without thirst that Circe changed men into swine. If Ulysses escaped the metamorphosis, it was thanks to the warning of Hermes and his natural temperance that he refrained from going beyond satiety.
Plato's Ulysses
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates makes Palamedes the subject of a play on words in which he sympathetically makes Nestor and Ulysses authors of oratorical writings.
The mestizo of Ulysses
In a series of articles published between 1965 and 1974 then grouped together in volume in 1974, the Hellenists Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne highlighted the coherence of a notion specific to Greek thought:mètis, a form of cunning intelligence with which are associated modes of action, structures of thought and ambivalent connotations. The gods, heroes and creatures of Greek mythology use mètis, but the Greeks also perceived it in certain animals and associated it with certain areas of skill (hunting, fishing, horse riding). Without having a monopoly on this cunning intelligence, Odysseus is one of the heroes most closely associated with him. In the Odyssey, it is said polutropos, "Ulysses of a thousand tricks", that is to say of a thousand tricks, who surpasses in ingenuity all the other heroes:his prudence and his cunning (disguises, lies) save his life several times during his journey and then his revenge against Penelope's suitors. The word is however questioned by Antisthenes, who says that the expression does not praise more than it blames Odysseus.
Hypothesis of the initiatory journey
On the symbolic level, the study of the interpolations of texts from different periods and styles in the Odyssey shows, according to certain authors23, that it was originally a symbolic initiatory journey, transformed by Homer into a narrative geographical voyage perhaps reminiscent of ancient navigational currents between the Pelasgians, the Peoples of the Sea, the Phoenicians and Asia Minor. Apart from Troy and Sicily, most of the places mentioned in the Odyssey are difficult to identify.
Archaeological research
The cult of Odysseus at Ithaca
Important archaeological discoveries made in the cave of Loïzos at Port Polis, north of Ithaca, allow us to affirm that a heroic cult was rendered to Odysseus. This cave, now half-submerged and collapsed following several earthquakes, was indeed a sanctuary from the Early Bronze Age until Roman times. As a sanctuary, it was closed, placed under the authority of priests and guarded by officers of the city. Among other things, there were found the remains of bronze tripods, very similar to those offered to Ulysses by the Phaeacians, remains on display today in the small museum of Stavros. In antiquity, such tripods were objects of prestige and price, "exclusively intended for ceremonial uses in the palaces of princes or for religious uses in the temples of the gods" writes the ethnologist Jean Cuisenier. They were also the prize offered to the winners of the funeral games in honor of the heroes. However, in the third century, games called Ὀδύσσεια, Odysseia, were celebrated in Ithaca in honor of Ulysses. Analysis of the bronzes from the Loïzos cave allows them to be dated to the 8th century BC. J.-C., they are therefore very posterior to the time of Ulysses, hero of the 13th century BC. J.-C.. Hellenistic terracotta masks were also discovered and especially a shard of terracotta votive mask bearing in full letters, and perfectly decipherable, a dedication to Ulysses:ΕΥΧΗΝ ΟΔΥΣΣΕΙ, "prayer (or wish) to Ulysses”. This fragment dated to the 3rd-2nd century BC. J.-C., today famous, attests without possible dispute that in these places a cult was rendered to the deified hero or to the god Ulysses. The German professor H.G. Buhholz located near Stavros, at a place called The School of Homer, the sanctuary of Odysseus dating from the Hellenistic period.
The significance of this cult is that the island of Ithaca was an obligatory point of passage for all sailors, captains of ships or leaders of expeditions en route to the Adriatic Sea, the Sea of Sicily or the Tyrrhenian Sea. Great navigators, the Greeks needed to recognize easily navigable maritime routes to the West, to locate anchorages, landmarks, and to know the regimes of the winds and currents. Odysseus himself says that his navigation is "a search for the gates (or passes) of the sea", πόρους ἁλὸς ἐξερεείνων. In these adventures which precede the expeditions for the foundation of colonies, the cave was used to celebrate an appropriate liturgy to pronounce before boarding a wish which one imagines identical to that which Ulysses in his nostalgia for Ithaca repeats so often:“May I find my wife and all my family safe and sound at home! »; and in the event of a happy return, sailors and captains could deposit an offering there to Ulysses, this hero of the νόστος, of the great return, "the man of a thousand tricks", an exemplary model of the Greek mestizo.
Ulysses Kingdom Locations
The Homeric Ithaca
The location of Ithaca described by Homer has long been debated:some authors [ref. necessary] think that it is the current Kefalonia, and the current Ithaca could then be the Homeric Pheacia (often identified in the current Corfu), because on the one hand a village of the name of Φεάκοι (Phéakoi) was located on the island, at Platrithrias28, and on the other hand the popular name of the island, Θιάκη, "Thiaki", could come from Φεάκια (Pheakia:it would not then be a deformation of Ιθάκη - Ithaca). However, it is very likely that the current island of Ithaca, which has practically never ceased to bear this name throughout history, corresponds to Homeric Ithaca, as the research work of several Greek scholars.
The so-called palace of Odysseus in Ithaca
For a long time Hellenists and archaeologists have sought to find the remains of the palace of Ulysses. Homer places this palace "at the foot of Mount Neion", and at a sufficient height to see the boats in the harbor and the port, distinguishing the maneuvers of the sailors. Archaeological excavations were carried out by the British School of Athens from 1930 on the heights of the current village of Stavros, north of Ithaca, at a place called "Platreithrias", in Greek Πλατρειθρίας. The site is now colloquially referred to as The School of Homer. After sixteen years of research, the archaeological mission of the University of Ioannina led by professors of prehistoric archeology Athanase Papadopoulos and Litsa Kondorli has announced that it has unearthed the palace of the legendary king of Ithaca. This discovery was carried out in collaboration with several archaeologists of international reputation, among others, the Swedish professor Paul Aström from the University of Gothenburg. It is based on multiple concordant indices. The remains of the important building that has been discovered follows the model of the Mycenaean palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos; it is built on two levels at eleven meters depth and difference in height, with stairs cut into the rock on the side of the hill, which confirms the descriptions of the Odyssey which evokes the servants constantly ascending and descending the stairs of the palace of Odysseus; the building has large stone foundations and is surrounded by fortified walls; the construction work of a fountain in the basement has been formally dated to the 13th century BC. AD by a specialist archaeologist from the University of Munich; Mycenaean pottery fragments and Linear B terracotta tablets have recently been discovered. From these heights, we have a view of the harbors of Ormos Polis and Frikès. In 2011, excavations continued on this site. This hypothesis is sufficiently substantiated according to the researchers to confirm that this palace from the Mycenaean period could only have belonged to the king of Ithaca; it is known as the "Palace of Odysseus", as that of Pylos is traditionally known as the "Palace of Nestor".
In the arts after Antiquity
Literature
The character of Ulysses has never ceased to inspire poets and writers, sometimes as a character from mythology, sometimes as a source of a rewriting or updating of the myth. The poets have highlighted in turn certain aspects of Ulysses' personality:Dante evokes Ulysses, a man of cunning and revenge, in canto XXVI of Hell, first part of the Divine Comedy:
"...and I wanted to ask you who is in this fire, so divided at its top that it looks as if it rises from the pyre on which Eteocles was set with his brother? He answered me:“In there are tormented Odysseus and Diomedes; together they are carried away by revenge, as they were by anger. »
In this scene, Dante invents a final journey made by Odysseus after his return to Ithaca and which leads to his downfall:unable to contain his thirst for travel, Odysseus leaves with his companions and explores the seas to the end of the world, but ends up engulfed in a storm by divine will. In the poem by Dante, a Christian author, Odysseus is guilty of the sin of libido sciendi, the excessive desire for knowledge. But over the following centuries, readers of Dante made other more positive interpretations of this passage, especially in the Romantic era.
Joachim Du Bellay sings the traveler at the beginning of sonnet 31 of Regrets with the famous verse:"Happy who, like Ulysses, has had a beautiful journey". In his collection Alcohols, (1920) Apollinaire exalts "the wise Ulysses", faithful to Penelope, in two stanzas of the Chanson du Mal-Aimé.
Novelists and playwrights have reinterpreted the character and his myth:Ulysses (1922), James Joyce's best-known novel, is a transcription of the Odyssey (organization into chapters, symbolism of the adventures, etc.) on a day of characters from Dublin , including the artist who plays the role of Télémaque. The myth of Ulysses also inspired Jean Giono Birth of the Odyssey. But in this novel, Ulysses is a womanizer who invents the Odyssey to justify his long absence. The character of Ulysses appears in the play La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu by Jean Giraudoux (1935) as the man of negotiation, lucid and realistic. Finally, in the novel Ulysses from Bagdad (2008), Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt reinterprets the character and the adventures of Ulysses in the form of an illegal immigrant who, leaving Iraq, tries to reach London. Schmitt operates a rewriting of the myth:he stages a journey of departure (and not a return as in the Odyssey) and resorts to a parodic humor reminiscent of that of Giraudoux, without however renouncing the seriousness of his remarks on the condition immigrants.
Music
Claudio Monteverdi's opera Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria is inspired by the end of the Odyssey.
Georges Brassens, in his song Joyeux qui, comme Ulysse (the beginning of which takes up first verse of Du Bellay's poem), takes up the theme of the adventures of Ulysses by associating travel with the values of freedom and friendship. The song appeared in the album Brassens chante Bruant, Colpi, Musset, Nadaud, Norge (1984).
Ridan, in the song Ulysse (2007), takes up Du Bellay's poem.
Juliette, in her song Petite messe solennelle, evokes the Greek hero.
Dance
The French choreographer Jean-Claude Gallotta created his founding work, Ulysses, in 1981, which he revisited many times throughout his career.
Cinema
Ulysses appears mainly in peplums (films with ancient subjects) which appear very early in the history of cinema. Most are often very free adaptations of the Iliad or the Odyssey. As early as 1905, the Frenchman Georges Méliès made a silent short film in black and white entitled The Island of Calypso:Ulysses and the Giant Polyphemus which, as its name suggests, merges two episodes of the Odyssey. In 1909, The Return of Ulysses, a silent film by André Calmettes and Charles Le Bargy, focuses on the second half of the epic with Ulysses' revenge against the suitors. One of the best-known peplums adapted from the epic is Ulysses, an Italian peplum directed by Mario Camerini in 1954, starring Kirk Douglas as Ulysses. Camerini generally follows the plot of the epic, but alternates the scenes of Odysseus' journey with a few scenes taking place in Ithaca in order to show Penelope and Telemachus confronting the suitors in the absence of the hero. Above all, it introduces several innovations, such as the fact that Ulysses pretends to have lost his memory when he runs aground on the island of the Phaeacians, and he merges certain episodes (for example the island of Calypso and the trip to land of the dead). More experimental, Pink Ulysses, by the German Eric de Kuyper, released in 1990, recounts the epic in a homoerotic aesthetic.
In 2004, the Hollywood peplum Troy, by Wolfgang Petersen, very freely adapts the story of the Trojan War by dwelling on the events of the Iliad but continuing the story until the capture of the city. Ulysses is played by Sean Bean, and his trickery and powers of persuasion play a big part in the plot, whether it's convincing Achilles to join the army or coming up with the idea for the horse's trickery. Troy.
Apart from the adaptations of the Odyssey, Ulysses appears in other peplums with entirely original plots. In Ulysses against Hercules, an Italian film by Mario Caiano released in 1962, Ulysses provokes the wrath of the gods by gouging out the Cyclops' eye and they send Hercules to capture him.
Apart from peplums, Ulysses is sometimes mentioned in other types of films which can take inspiration from the character and his adventures by transposing them into other contexts or by simply alluding to them. Thus, in The Return of Mervyn LeRoy, released in 1948, the doctor Ulysses Lee Johnson (Clark Gable) is torn between his love for his wife Penny (Anne Baxter; Penny is the American diminutive of Penelope), who awaits him in the States United, and an adulterous love for a nurse he met while away from home during the war. O'Brother by the Coen brothers (released in 2000) is a free transposition of the Odyssey in the American Middle West.
TV series
Bekim Fehmiu plays Ulysses in Franco Rossi's The Odyssey series (1968).
In 1968, the Italian director Franco Rossi made the first adaptation of the Odyssey as a television series, under the title The Odyssey, a Franco-Italian-German-Yugoslavian co-production in eight 50-minute episodes which closely followed the frame of the Homeric epic.
An American mini-series, The Odyssey, in turn adapted the epic in 1997. Ulysses is played there by Armand Assante.
In 2013, a Franco-Italian-Portuguese series, Odysseus, created by Frédéric Azémar, directed by Stéphane Giusti and broadcast in France on the Arte channel, was inspired by the second half of the Odyssey and staged the Odysseus' return to Ithaca seen by those who await him there, Penelope, Telemachus and the suitors for Penelope's hand. The series then imagines what happens after the end of the epic and gives a rather dark vision of Odysseus, made paranoid and violent by the war and by his long wandering.
The character of Ulysses also appears in animated television series intended for a child or family audience. The Franco-Japanese animated series Ulysses 31 (1981) very freely transposes the adventures of Ulysses into a science fiction universe mixed with science fantasy set in the 31st century AD. J.-C. Odysseus travels in a huge spaceship called Odysseus in the company of his son Telemachus and his companions. The plot begins when Odysseus leaves the planet Troy to return to Earth. But during the first episode, the ship wanders off to a planet where the Cyclops lives, a monstrous machine subject to a blood cult; for having killed the Cyclops, Odysseus and the passengers of the Odysseus are condemned by the gods to wander the galaxy until they reach the kingdom of Hades. In 2002, a French animated series, L'Odyssée (2002), created by David Michel, depicted the adventures of Ulysses during his return trip to Ithaca, very freely inspired by the Odyssey, in a universe of peplum embellished with fantasy.