Odysseus is the hero of the Odyssey: king of the island of Ithaca, son of Laertes, husband of Penelope and father of Telemachus, one of the Greek chiefs who sacked Troy. The poem presents him from its first lines as the man "of many turns," he who wandered much and knew the cities and customs of many peoples.
When the story begins, he is the only one of the heroes who survived the war who has not yet returned home. He is held on the island of the nymph Calypso, and in Ithaca other men court his wife and consume his goods. The gods decide that the year of return has come, and the poem follows his homecoming. To the Phaeacians, who receive him without knowing who he is, he gives his name only when the king asks him: "I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, who for all my stratagems am a subject among men, and my fame reaches the sky."
What defines him is cunning. Nestor reminds Telemachus that at Troy no one wanted to match wits with Odysseus, because he prevailed from afar with every kind of trick, and Athena tells Odysseus himself that he is by far the best of all mortals in counsel and speech. He lies with ease, changes his appearance when he needs to, and knows how to wait. But he also endures: before Calypso he states that, if a god wrecks him at sea, he will bear it, "having in his breast a steadfast heart in pain," and he weeps in secret, with his cloak over his face, when the singer Demodocus recalls Troy for him.
The Odyssey strips him of everything: he loses the ships, the companions, the clothes, and, for a time, even his name. He reaches Ithaca disguised as a beggar and must prove, person by person, who he is. For this reason the poem is often read as the story of a man taken apart and put back together, and Odysseus as the question of what remains of someone when everything is taken from him. The answer he gives himself is simple: "I cannot see any other land sweeter than this one," he says of Ithaca, and it is for that land, that house, and those people that he refuses all the other lives offered to him.