Who Was Odysseus? A Guide for Families

Greek mythology has two kinds of hero. Some are strong — Hercules strangles lions, Achilles is unbeatable in a fight. And then there is Odysseus.

Odysseus is the first hero in Western literature whose weapon is his head. That makes him a very different figure for children than the muscle heroes — and, frankly, a more useful one.

Who he was

Odysseus was king of Ithaca, a small rocky island in western Greece. No great empire, no golden city: a manageable kingdom where he lived with his wife Penelope and his newborn son Telemachus.

Then came the war at Troy and he had to go. According to legend he did not want to — he even tried to get out of it by feigning madness, which was exposed when someone laid his infant son in front of the plough and he swerved.

He went to war, stayed ten years, and needed another ten to get back.

What sets him apart: the idea, not the fist

In every important scene, Odysseus solves the problem with an invention.

At Troy the Greeks spend ten years outside walls they cannot breach. Odysseus proposes a wooden horse with soldiers inside — the city drags its own defeat through its gates. The Trojan Horse is the most famous stratagem in history.

In the Cyclops's cave there is no way out, because only the giant can move the boulder. Odysseus calls himself "Nobody", blinds him, and gets his men out under the bellies of the sheep. The Story of Odysseus and the Cyclops is essentially a riddle with a solution.

At the Sirens he wants to hear the song that kills everyone who hears it — so he has himself lashed to the mast and plugs his men's ears with wax. Again not a feat of courage but a construction.

His mistakes, and why they matter

What makes Odysseus so valuable for children is not his cleverness. It is that he regularly undoes it himself.

The great moment comes at the end of the Cyclops episode. He has escaped, everyone is safe, the ship is at sea — and then he shouts his real name at the blinded giant because he wants him to know who did it. Polyphemus is a son of Poseidon. From that sentence on, the sea god hunts him for ten years.

The story could hardly be clearer: his head saved him, his pride billed him, in the same scene.

In the Bag of Winds something related happens from the other direction. Odysseus does not tell his men what is in the sack. They assume it is treasure he is keeping from them, open it — and the storm blows them away from an Ithaca they could already see. A secret that never needed to be one.

Penelope: the other half

Odysseus gets told about constantly and his wife almost never — which is odd, because Penelope is at least as ingenious as he is.

While he is away for twenty years, dozens of men sit in her house eating through the stores and demanding she marry one of them. She cannot throw them out. So she says she will decide as soon as she has finished weaving a particular cloth — and every night she unpicks what she wove that day.

It works for three years. It is exactly the same kind of mind as the "Nobody" trick: not a fight, but a construction that stalls the opponent using his own expectations.

Worth mentioning to children, because otherwise the impression easily forms that clever solutions are a male speciality. In this story they emphatically are not.

What to do with all this at home

Odysseus is excellent for conversation because he is never simply "good".

• "Was calling himself Nobody clever or sneaky?" — children almost always say clever, which leads straight to when deception is acceptable.
• "Why did he shout his name when he was already safe?" — the best question in the collection.
• "What should he have told his men about the bag?" — works surprisingly well during sibling arguments.

What age

Our versions target ages 6 to 8. Odysseus needs more language awareness than other heroes, because his victories consist of puns and constructions — a four-year-old follows the plot but the point evaporates.

Upwards he is essentially unlimited. Eleven-year-olds take the pride dimension out of the same story, which they missed entirely at seven.

Where he turns up later

Almost everywhere. "Odyssey" for a long, difficult journey comes directly from him. "Between Scylla and Charybdis" comes from his voyage. A "Trojan horse" is now a term in computer security — a program you let in yourself.

A child who knows the stories does not later meet these expressions as vocabulary but as recognitions. That is a bigger head start than it sounds.

Where to start

Not at the beginning of the war, but with the strongest piece: Odysseus and the Cyclops. Then The Trojan Horse, then The Bag of Winds.

All three are in the mythology collection, each with full narration.

Read next: The "Nobody" trick explained · The Odyssey for kids · The Trojan Horse for kids

Listen: the mythology collection.