One of the most famous heroes of literature, Ulysses is an important leader on the Greek side during the Trojan War, and his invention of the Trojan Horse helps the Greeks win the war. On his way back to Greece, Ulysses’s small fleet of three ships gets into a series of troubles fighting gods and monsters, until all the ships are lost and he wanders alone for many years before finally finding his way home. Ulysses has all the traits of a classic hero: courage, ambition, loyalty, resourcefulness, and a heart for adventure. His exploits and the decisions he makes were first described in epic poems by Homer nearly 3,000 years ago, and they set the standard for heroic quests in Western literature.

Brother of Zeus and god of the sea, Poseidon goes his own way, often at war with the other gods. When he learns that Ulysses has wounded his son Polyphemus the Cyclops, he becomes angry and hunts the warrior with storms and monsters, dashing his ships, killing his men, and trying again and again to drown Ulysses. The other gods, unhappy with Poseidon’s vendetta, quietly offer aid and comfort to Ulysses. Poseidon loses his bid to prevent Ulysses from returning home, but prophecy predicts that Ulysses will die at the hand of his own child, using a stinger from the sea as a weapon.

The Cyclopes are one-eyed giants who used to work for Zeus in his lightning bolt forge but now live and quarrel on a small island. Polyphemus is the biggest and meanest of them all; he roams the island, eating goats or diving into the ocean to overturn boats and consume the men onboard. Ulysses blinds Polyphemus and then crows about it, causing the Cyclops to pray to his father Poseidon, who punishes Ulysses for 10 years with storms and other disasters. Like many other troubles Ulysses must face during his long exile, Polyphemus is a random piece of bad luck, but it is Ulysses’s arrogance in defeating the Cyclops that causes the punishments to rain down on him for 10 years.

A demigod, Circe is a stunningly alluring sorceress who enchants men and turns them into animals. She transforms her old husbands into immortal creatures that dwell, ever lonely, on her beautiful island. Capable of great love and great cruelty, Circe symbolizes the goddess-demon adored and feared in men’s imaginations down through the ages. Ulysses becomes her all-time favorite mate, and he breaks her heart by leaving to honor his promise to return his men to their homes. Ulysses and Circe represent the contrast between those who become trapped by romantic love and those who escape by answering a higher calling.

As lovely, talented, and love-prone as her cousin Circe, Calypso also controls magic powers and owns an island filled with animals who used to be her husbands. Like Circe, she struggles with an obsession with human men; also like Circe, she finds one she can’t quite control in Ulysses. Although they live happily together for years, he finally must leave because wife and duty beckon. Calypso represents the other side of Ulysses’s adventures—goddesses who chafe under their own strange circumstances. Tired of equally selfish and spoiled gods, these women turn to humans for comfort, only to lose them to old age, the whims of Zeus or Poseidon, or—in Ulysses’s case—a hero’s desire to face mortal challenges instead of an empty immortality.

Headstrong, brilliant, lively, and stunningly beautiful, Princess Nausicaa of Phaeacia is the 16-year-old daughter of Queen Arete and King Alcinous. Told in a dream by Athene to “Take your serving girls to the river and wash your clothes” (131), Nausicaa does so, meets the shipwrecked Ulysses, and falls in love with him. Although he cannot marry her, he feels love for her. Nausicaa is the third and most wonderful of three formidable and beautiful women whom Ulysses meets on his long journey. In the battle between Athene and Poseidon over the fate of Ulysses, Nausicaa becomes a weapon in the wisdom goddess’s hands, and the experience so changes the young princess that she forswears royal life and becomes a traveling singer who tells of Ulysses’s exploits.

The wife of Ulysses, Penelope waits 20 years for him to return from the Trojan War and his wanderings. Many suitors seek her hand, and she promises to choose one after she has finished knitting her husband’s burial shroud, but each night she undoes the day’s work. She and Ulysses reunite after he battles and slays her suitors. Penelope’s work on the shroud symbolizes the back-and-forth between hope and despair suffered by those at home who await for their loved ones to return from war.

An infant when his father left for war, Telemachus is a strong, capable, and honorable young man when Ulysses returns. For years, he tried to protect his mother Penelope’s honor against the intrusions of greedy suitors, and for a time he searches at sea for news of his father. They reunite, and Telemachus helps Ulysses retake the castle, fighting fiercely at his father’s side during the climactic battle. During Ulysses’s wanderings, Telemachus serves as a ray of hope for the aging warrior and a reason to continue his struggle to get home.

The demigod Aeolus is the Keeper of the Winds, responsible for imprisoning the worst gales inside a great mountain on an island surrounded by a tall bronze wall. At the gods’ command, Aeolus releases a wind, then recalls it when the gods’ purposes are complete. He’s “an enormously fat demigod with a long wind-tangled beard and a red and wind-beaten face. He loved to eat and drink, and fight, play games, and hear stories” (29-30). His 12 children each command the weather for a month, riding the winds and overseeing clouds and rain. Aeolus hosts Ulysses and his men at a banquet at his castle, and Ulysses tells the Wind Keeper stories about the Trojan War and his later adventures. To thank him for the entertaining tales, Aeolus grants Ulysses the west wind and a bagful of other winds to help him on his journey. The gift goes terribly wrong, and the men end up far from home. Aeolus is the first of many gods who help Ulysses, whose respectful and heroic presence they prefer to Poseidon’s arbitrary brutality.