Achilles is the hero of the Iliad — the great fighter who chooses a short, glorious life. Odysseus is the hero of the Odyssey — the great survivor who chooses to come home.
Where Achilles stands in the open and burns, Odysseus hides his name and lives. He is “polytropos” — the man of many turns, many tricks, many shapes. He blinds a cyclops by calling himself Outis — Nobody. He returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar and lets twenty years’ worth of suitors mock him in his own hall before he string his bow.
He is not a clean hero. He lies for sport, leaves men behind, takes a long detour with Calypso, and butchers a hundred unarmed men in a single afternoon. But he is loyal — to Penelope, to Telemachus, to Ithaca — in a way the Iliad’s heroes are not. Nostos is the harder ambition than kleos, and Homer’s quiet argument is that Odysseus chooses the harder one.