Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Odysseus.
The gallery
Odysseus and his men blinding Polyphemus (Eleusis Amphora, detail)
Polyphemus Painter (proto-Attic), c. 660 BC
The neck of the great proto-Attic funerary amphora from Eleusis (Archaeological Museum of Eleusis, inv. 2630) carries the oldest surviving image of the Cyclops episode in Odyssey 9: Odysseus and his comrades drive a sharpened stake into the single eye of Polyphemus while the giant reclines drunk. Painted in bold silhouette and incision about 660 BC, generations before the red-figure masters, the scene already fixes the hero as the man of violent cunning — 'many-wiled Odysseus' who tells the blinded monster that his name is Nobody. The vase is one of the foundational documents of Odysseus in art.
The Embassy to Achilles (Attic red-figure cup, Louvre G146)
Ambassador Painter (attributed), c. 480 BC
On this Attic red-figure cup in the Louvre (inv. G 146), the embassy of Iliad 9 unfolds in three registers: Phoenix, Ajax, and Odysseus come before the sulking Achilles seated in his hut, each ambassador marked by name. Homer makes Odysseus the peer of Zeus in counsel and the first to speak with gifts and flattering words; the vase gives visual form to the diplomatic side of the hero at Troy — the same man who will later invent the Wooden Horse. The embassy scene was a favourite subject of Athenian painters because it dramatised persuasion, pride, and the cost of Achilles' wrath.
The Procession of the Trojan Horse into Troy
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, c. 1760
Giandomenico Tiepolo's oil (National Gallery, London, inv. NG3319) shows the Trojans hauling the giant horse through their gates while citizens throng the walls — the stratagem Apollodorus ascribes to Odysseus, who persuaded Epeius to build the hollow timber and hid warriors inside. The inscription on the horse reads PALADI VOTUM, 'an offering to Pallas Athena,' echoing the false dedication Sinon told the Trojans. Tiepolo's airy Venetian brushwork turns the cunning trick of the Ilioupersis into a civic festival marching toward catastrophe.
Odysseus and the Sirens (the "Siren Vase")
The Siren Painter, c. 480–470 BC
The Attic red-figure stamnos in the British Museum, painted by the artist known from it as the Siren Painter, is the canonical ancient image of Odyssey 12: Odysseus stands lashed upright to the mast, straining toward the Sirens' song while his rowers — ears stopped with wax — pull past the meadow of bones. Circe warned him that no man who hears their music and reaches them returns; only the hero's insistence on hearing the song while bound preserves both knowledge and life. Three bird-bodied Sirens wheel above the rocks in the form Homer and Pausanias describe, not the later mermaid.
Odysseus and Calypso
Arnold Böcklin, 1882
Böcklin's oil (Kunstmuseum Basel, inv. 108) stages the fifth book of the Odyssey on the island Ogygia: the nymph Calypso, who detained Odysseus seven years longing to make him her husband, confronts the hero turned away from her in stiff, columnar grief. Homer has her find him weeping on the shore, yearning for Ithaca and Penelope, until Hermes orders his release. Böcklin's melancholy Symbolist treatment — the hero's averted back, the lyre at Calypso's side — influenced later painters including de Chirico and fixed the wanderer as a figure of inward exile even in paradise.
Odysseus and Nausicaa
Friedrich Preller the Elder, 1864
Preller the Elder's history painting renders the meeting at the river mouth in Odyssey 6: the shipwrecked stranger, still caked with sea-brine, supplicates the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa while her handmaids scatter at the apparition. Athena sent the maiden to wash linen there so that she might discover the castaway and bring him to her father Alcinous' house. Preller's neoclassical composition balances the naked vulnerability of the hero against the composed modesty of the princess — the civilised threshold between wandering and homecoming.
Tiresias Appears to Ulysses during the Sacrifice
Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), 1780–1785
Fuseli's painting (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) dramatises the Nekyia of Odyssey 11: Odysseus, come to the house of Hades with blood-offerings, watches the ghost of the blind seer Tiresias rise to prophesy his future — the suitors devouring his substance, the need for a final voyage inland, and peace at last. Homer makes this the only shade that speaks to the hero with knowledge rather than lament; Ajax, Agamemnon, and Achilles pass through the same book, but Tiresias alone tells what is still to come. Fuseli's theatrical chiaroscuro turns the underworld consultation into a Romantic ordeal of foresight.
Penelope Recognizing the Returned Odysseus (Roman fresco from the Macellum, Pompeii)
Unknown (Roman wall-painter), Before AD 79
A Roman fresco from the Macellum of Pompeii, buried by Vesuvius in AD 79, shows the climax of the Odyssey's homecoming: Penelope at last confronts her husband returned in the disguise of a beggar. The scene belongs to a popular Hellenistic-Roman cycle of Odysseus episodes and preserves one of the best ancient images of the recognition that follows the slaughter of the suitors — the moment when the queen's caution yields to certainty. For Odysseus the image captures the end of twenty years of war and wandering: the man of many devices unmasked in his own hall.
Slaughter of the Suitors (Mnesterophonia, Campanian red-figure bell-krater)
Ixion Painter, c. 330 BC
Side A of this Campanian red-figure bell-krater in the Louvre (inv. CA 7124), attributed to the Ixion Painter, depicts the mnesterophonia — the killing of Penelope's suitors — as Homer tells it in Odyssey 22: Odysseus, aided by Telemachus and the swineherd Eumaeus, cuts down the men who devoured his house. The vase labels the episode with the Greek term for 'slaying of the suitors' and shows the hero in action at the right of the composition. It is one of the few ancient images to treat the violent restoration of kingship on Ithaca as a subject worthy of the painter's craft.
Dispute between Ajax and Odysseus for Achilles' Armour (Attic black-figure oinochoe)
Taleides Painter, c. 520 BC
The Taleides Painter's black-figure oinochoe in the Louvre (inv. F 340) shows Ajax and Odysseus confronting one another over the arms of the dead Achilles — the contest Apollodorus and Homer both remember, decided in Odysseus' favour and fatal to Ajax' pride. The kalos inscription and balanced pairing of the two heroes capture a bitter postscript to the Trojan War: the man of brute force against the man of speech, with victory going to the counsellor whose eloquence had swayed the army. The episode shadows Odysseus' entire legend with the grief of his greatest rival.
On screen
Ulysses
Mario Camerini
Kirk Douglas' wanderer compresses the Odyssey into Technicolor spectacle — Polyphemus, the Sirens and Circe in a single voyage — the definitive screen Ulysses of its century.
Ulysses 31
A French-Japanese animated odyssey exiled to the 31st century: the gods scatter Ulysses' way home across the stars, and each island of the poem returns as a space trial for his ship, the Odysseus.