Odysseus

Men know his name for cunning, and the gods know it too, which is why he is here and not there. He built the wooden horse. He sailed from Troy with twelve ships and six hundred men. He returned alone, on a stranger’s vessel, asleep, deposited on a beach he could no longer recognize. Between Troy and Ithaca lay everything: the Cyclops’s cave, the bag of winds opened by his men’s hands within sight of home, Circe’s island where he stayed too long, the Underworld where he could not hold his mother, the Sirens who knew his name, six men taken by Scylla while he watched, Helios’s cattle, Zeus’s thunderbolt, seven years on Calypso’s shore weeping at the water. Each chapter he loses men. Each chapter he learns the cost of his own mind. [SPOILER: Athena turns him into an old beggar at the shoreline. He walks into his own hall and lets the suitors throw a footstool at him. He listens to the swineherd describe him as dead. He watches his wife weep for him without speaking. He locks the doors. He shoots Antinous through the throat as the cup is rising to his lips. He hangs the maids. He kneels in the vineyard and tells his father a Cretan lie before showing him the boar scar. He plants an oar inland and makes peace with Poseidon. The man who left was a king. The man who returned had been ground down to almost nothing and then had to put the kingdom back together with his own hands.]