You have probably used the word a dozen times. A long road trip becomes an odyssey. A complicated career path is an odyssey. A family saga? Definitely an odyssey.
But that word has a story of its own and it goes back more than 2,700 years.
It Started With Homer
The word traces to a Greek poet named Homer and his epic poem, the Odyssey, believed to have been written sometime in the 7th century BC. The poem tells the story of a legendary hero named Odysseus and his long, dangerous journey home after fighting in the Trojan War.
The Odyssey is 24 chapters long. But here is the interesting part: the poem does not cover all ten years of Odysseus’ voyage. It picks up in the middle, with him stranded on an island, held captive by a sea nymph named Calypso. The actual action of the poem covers only the last month or so of his homecoming. The rest is told through his own recollections.
Quite a Journey
Even so, Homer packed the poem with unforgettable adventures. Odysseus battles a Cyclops, escapes giant cannibals, crosses paths with a sorceress, squeezes past the Sirens, survives a treacherous whirlpool, and even makes a trip into the Underworld.
When he finally reaches home on the island of Ithaca, his troubles are not over. More than 100 unwanted suitors have moved into his household, each hoping to marry his queen, Penelope, and take his place. Odysseus drives them out, in what the poem describes as a decidedly bloody fashion, then reveals his true identity to his wife. The two are finally reunited after years apart.
Odysseus was the King of Ithaca. He had been reluctant to leave for the Trojan War, a prophecy had warned him the journey home would be long and hard. He went anyway, leaving behind his queen and their young son. The prophecy turned out to be right.
The Meaning Behind the Name
So where does the name Odysseus come from? That turns out to be a puzzle that scholars have wrestled with for a long time.
The name appears in several different forms across the dialects of ancient Greece, and its roots may be even older than Greek itself. That makes its original meaning hard to pin down.
The most widely discussed theory is that the name connects to an ancient Greek word meaning “to hate.” Homer himself appears to play on that idea in the text of the poem. If that theory holds, the name Odysseus may have carried the sense of someone who was, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “hated by gods and men.”
It fits his reputation. Odysseus was not your straightforward sword-and-shield hero. He was known as a cunning trickster, someone who relied on cleverness and deception rather than raw strength. That same quality makes the word odious and its Latin cousin odium distant relatives of his name.
It is a funny thing to think about. A word you use casually today, odyssey, carries inside it the name of a flawed, clever, deeply human hero from 700 BC. A man who just wanted to get home.
