Despite Homeric emphasis on male heroism, women and female divinities play central roles in both poems.

The Odyssey is a tale of a hero of exceptional endurance and metis (cunning intelligence) who wins kleos (fame) by achieving a successful nostos (return home). The poem establishes the oikos (home) as a locus for heroic activity by portraying hospitality (xeneia) as sacred to Zeus and by investing all domestic guardians with ethical and intellectual superiority over the perpetrators of bia (brute force) who would destroy the hero’s house and family and bring anarchy on his kingdom.

In Homeric poetry, home is the most important unit of society (offenses against which are treated most severely) and characters’ drive to return home motivates much of epic narrative.

This essay addresses the many-sided figure of Odysseus: his significance in the Iliad as well as – centrally – in the Odyssey, but also his mixed reputation in the traditions known to the Epic Cycle, and later in Athenian tragedy. The essay notes his uncertain relation to the warrior-hero ethos and details the way the Odyssey shapes a song around him, valorizing his mêtis and his nostos, his ultimate return to Ithaka ‒ and the restoration of right rule and order in the household (oikos) ‒ redeeming the ambiguity of his most distinctive epithet, polutropos (“of many turns”). En route the essay contrasts the powerful shaping logic of the Odyssey with the episodic Telegony; considers the aristeia the hero receives in the Odyssey (and not the Iliad); highlights the significance of Penelope and their “like-mindedness” (homophrosunê); and notes the treatment of Odysseus in Athenian tragedy, whose dramatists (Sophocles, Euripides) take a far less sanguine view of the hero than does the Odyssey.