Odysseus – Hero or Villain?

  Odysseus – Hero or Villain?

The question that is being raised is whether the Odysseus whom we find revealed in the Iliad and the Odyssey should be regarded as a Homeric hero or a villain. The Wisdom Library offers the following summary: Homeric heroes are defined as characters from Homer's epics characterized by their complexity, showcasing a blend of virtues and flaws. These heroes exemplify personal enterprise, strength, beauty, and courage, along with unique individual qualities that empower them to assert their will. This multifaceted nature highlights the richly nuanced portrayal of heroism in literature, illustrating how these figures navigate their challenges through both admirable traits and human imperfections.

Key characteristics of Homeric heroes:

• Physical prowess: They are physically superior, with great strength, stamina, and agility.
• Courage and dignity: They face death with bravery and dignity, even when their fate is known.
• Personal honor: The hero's honor is paramount. They cannot endure insults and will risk death to protect their reputation.
• Quest for glory: They seek glory and immortality through great deeds, as this is the only way to achieve lasting fame after they die.
• Intellect and cunning: They are also intelligent and resourceful, using their cunning to solve problems and escape danger.
• Complex morality: They are not always perfect and can exhibit flaws, with their actions often shaped by rage, pride, or personal struggle.
• Social responsibility: Despite their individual pursuits, they have a sense of duty to their community and family. 

I think that the physical appearance of Odysseus gives us some clue as to his personality. The best description that we have of him occurs when old King Priam and Helen were standing on the walls of Troy looking at the Achaeans forces gathered on the plains below them. I quote the passage in its entirety because their description of Odysseus gives us much to consider about the type of person that he was.

Secondly, when he spotted Odysseus, the old man asked her another question. “Come now my dear child and let me ask who that man is? He is shorter than Agamemnon the son of Atreus by a head but is broader in the chest and shoulders. His weapons lie upon the rich earth but he goes about the ranks of his warriors like a ram. Yes, he is just like a thick-fleeced ram roaming through a large flock of white sheep.”

Then Helen, born of Zeus, did answer him. “That is the prudent and crafty Odysseus, son of Laertes, nurtured among the people of Ithaca. He is a rugged one and is known for all sorts of wily strategies and deceits.”

Then in answer to her the wise Antenor spoke again. “Woman, what you say is entirely true, for once before the divine Odysseus came here with the war-loving Menelaus on a mission on your account. I received them both in my meeting hall and was friendly towards them and became aware of their feelings and prudent counsel. They were gathered together with all the assembled Trojans and when standing, Menelaus with his broad shoulders was the tallest of all, but when seated, Odysseus was surely the most impressive. But when they started to weave the fabric of their words and plans, then Menelaus spoke fluently to the assembly, not with many words but clearly spoken, not wordy or rambling, even though he was the younger man. But when the wily Odysseus sprang up to speak, he cast his eyes towards the earth and held his sceptre firmly, neither waving it forward or backward but standing perfectly still like an unskilled man. You would have considered him a senseless man and a fool but when his great voice resonated from his chest and his words were like the snowflakes driven by a wintry storm, then no other mortal would consider wrangling with Odysseus and we no longer marvelled at just his appearance.”

Throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, Odysseus displayed behaviours than can best be attributed to what is commonly known as the short man complex. Also known as the Napoleon complex or little man syndrome, it is a social stereotype that suggests that shorter men may overcompensate for their height with aggressive or domineering behaviour. This is a popular belief linked to inferiority complex that originated with British propaganda about Napoleon Bonaparte that focused on his height and temperament. It is important to note that this is a social stereotype and not a medical diagnosis and is just a theory about behavioural compensation. But the fact remains that the shorter and broader Odysseus acted very much like a loud-mouthed bully and in addition to often displaying aggressive and domineering behaviour, he also acted in ways that were cunning and deceitful, perhaps in an attempt to make up for his smaller physical stature.

Odysseus was sometimes described by Homer as noble, praiseworthy, steadfast, divine, great-hearted, dear to Zeus and godlike, but more often than not, he was called wily, crafty, resourceful, wise counsellor and a man of many counsels. Although he was shown as active on the battlefield and was the slayer of many, his fighting prowess was not praised abundantly by Homer, although there was one reference to him as being the sacker of cities. Most times he was shown as an enraged fighter who lashed out because of the death of certain of his comrades, rather than the heroic fighter that we expect to see on the battlefield. Odysseus himself was wounded in the war, but it seems that he was better known as the person who rid the Achaeans of the blabber-mouth Thersites, rather than the heroic hero wielding his weapons in the midst of the action.

Let us recall how Odysseus got to Troy in the first place, for his journey there was certainly not based in heroism. Odysseus had been the one who had brokered the deal among Helen’s suitors that they would take up arms collectively if harm were to come to the Spartan queen. Odysseus was not a suitor because he was more interested in Penelope, Helen’s cousin. When war was declared after Helen’s apparent abduction, Odysseus was reluctant to participate. An embassy was sent from King Agamemnon to convince him otherwise and he feigned madness in an attempt to escape service in the Achaean army. His ruse was caught out by Palamedes and he reluctantly agreed to go to Troy. Legend has it that he got his own back against Palamedes by conspiring with Diomedes to have him charged with being a traitor to the Greeks in Troy and seeing him subsequently executed for his crime. These events were said to have taken place early in the war and were not mentioned in the Iliad itself, but nevertheless they do shed light on the personality of Odysseus. His revenge plot and the subsequent demise of Palamedes were certainly not the products of a heroic man.

Odysseus was better known for his speaking ability rather than his fighting prowess. He was the one, very early in the Iliad, who was chosen to lead the embassy to the priest Chryses and to undertake the return of his daughter. He was also able to convince the Danaans to return to the fighting when Agamemnon’s attempt to kindle their fighting spirit failed and they all rushed to the ships in order to make for home. Likewise it was Odysseus who was chosen to lead the delegation to Achilles in an attempt to convince the hero to rejoin the fighting. He was also turned to by leaders like Agamemnon because of his wise counsel, but did not appear to hold the same rank in this regard as did King Nestor of Pylos.

But even more than his speaking ability and his wise counsel, Odysseus was mainly known in the Iliad for his craftiness and guile. Those qualities were demonstrated when he and Diomedes snuck out of the Achaean camp on a night-time spying mission to the Trojan encampment. Their killing of the Trojan spy Dolon was hardly heroic since they had given the man hope that he would be spared. It seems that undercover work was right up his alley for Odysseus because in the Odyssey, Helen shared a similar story of Odysseus sneaking into the citadel of Troy on the same kind of mission. Of course the crowning touch for the craftiness of the man from Ithaca was his tour de force in planning and executing the whole episode of the Trojan horse. This has gone down in history as the finest example of military strategy and deception ever devised in warfare and we have Odysseus to thank for it.

The Odysseus whom we witness in the Odyssey was not very different insofar as he displayed more non-heroic than heroic tendencies, despite the glowing epithets that Homer used to describe him. He called him ill-fated, much-enduring and unlucky, all of which give us the impression that the terrible things that happened to him were not his fault. A few times the bard referred to him as being devious, wily and crafty, but in the main, the descriptors applied to Odysseus showed nothing other than high praise. He is variously described as stout-hearted, noble, god-reared, Zeus-fostered, a glorious and wise lord. The most common epithet that Homer used to describe Odysseus was the term godlike. He used the term hundreds of times in the Odyssey and the question before us is whether or not Odysseus behaved in a godlike manner. After all, this was the noble man and godlike king who Penelope spoke of when she said:

Odysseus never uttered a bad word or did a wrong thing to any man in the land, as is the practice of godlike kings.

Commentators wax eloquent about the ten year struggle that Odysseus endured as he attempted to return home and the significance of his Nostos. The fact of the matter is that for the longest time Odysseus did not seem to care a damn about his family or his kingdom. He spent two years trying to get home, not ten. The other eight years were spent living in the lap of luxury and returning each night to the warm bed and the open arms of the two trollops, Calypso and Circe. He may have sat by the seaside moaning about his fate, but in actual fact he did little to alter it. He finally got around to building a boat on Calypso’s island, but presumably the raw materials for doing so had been available to him for years. Likewise he had no intention of leaving Circe, until his crewmen finally wore him down and piled the guilt on him for ignoring his home. All in all, these were not really the actions of a legitimate hero.

This was the man who deliberately put the lives of his crew in danger on more than one occasion. He was determined to hear the song of the Sirens and ordered that his ship be steered perilously close to their domain. Only the beeswax in the crew’s ears saved them from utter destruction. Likewise, this was the man who stood up in his boat and bragged to the Cyclops Polyphemus after he had blinded him. Fortunately the blind monster’s aim was impeded as he flung huge boulders at the ship anchored offshore. Ultimately Poseidon destroyed the crew for the role that they played in the attack that Odysseus had orchestrated against the god’s son. At every juncture it appeared that Odysseus pursued his own aims rather than thinking about the impact of his actions on others. Godlike perhaps, but a mean and selfish god, not a loving one.

At the end of the Odyssey we see the return of Odysseus to Ithaca and the completion of his Nostos. But he does not return to his kingdom as a noble and conquering hero. Instead he makes his way back into his palace and his life disguised as a woeful beggar. This was not the white knight riding over the castle drawbridge to the glorious welcome of his subjects. Instead he took on the role of a crafty undercover assassin and brutally murdered 108 noblemen. Not content with that display of unfettered rage, he went on to have 12 handmaidens strung up by their necks in the courtyard. Then when he was finished, he returned to his father’s home and instead of falling into his grieving father’s arms like a dutiful returning prodigal son, he could not help himself but play a trick on the old man. Are all these the actions of a hero or a villain?

I conclude that the actions displayed by Odysseus were anything but heroic, but perhaps I go too far in suggesting that they were villainous. Instead, we can perhaps label him an anti-hero. An anti-hero is a central character in a story who lacks traditional heroic qualities like nobility and idealism. An anti-hero often has flawed morals, a selfish or ambiguous motivation and may use questionable or violent means to achieve his goals, even though his ultimate aim is at times good. Such a complex and flawed individual can be seen as a mix between hero and villain. Instead of the conventional heroic traits, the anti-hero may be arrogant, selfish, cynical and cowardly. The anti-hero will sometimes use questionable tactics to achieve a positive outcome. This is a psychologically complicated person who often exhibits a history of bad decisions, many times motivated by personal goals. Their reasons for acting can be selfish, driven by vengeance or simply because they have been put into a situation where they must act a certain way to survive.

Was Odysseus a hero, a villain or an anti-hero? My vote rests with the latter definition.