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17 unusual facts about Odysseus


Accusative case

in exclamations, such as me miseram, "wretched me" (spoken by Circe to Ulysses in Ovid's Remedium Amoris; note that this is feminine: the masculine form would be me miserum).

Aci Trezza

According to local legend, these great stones are the ones thrown at Odysseus in The Odyssey.

Baius

Baios (Βάϊος), Odysseus' helmsman, according to tradition buried in a bay near Naples that was named after him Baiae.

Commitment device

An early example of a commitment device is the tale of Odysseus ordering his men to lash him to the mast of the ship so that he would be able to hear the sirens' song without jumping overboard.

Corciano

A mythical founder Coragino, companion of Ulysses, is a medieval invention recounted in the fourteenth-century Conto di Corciano e di Perugia.

Gemma Doyle Trilogy

Gemma's adventures in Rebel Angels parallels some of Odysseus.

Gryll Grange

The book's title turns about the belief of its owner, Gregory Gryll, 'though he found it difficult to trace the pedigree, that he was lineally descended from the ancient and illustrious Gryllus, who maintained against Ulysses the superior happiness of the life of other animals to that of the life of man.'

Imme Dros

From the 90s on she made the classic works of Homer and other Greek mythology stories into new forms.One of those books about a character from Greek Mythology is Odysseus : een man van verhalen, this book describes how Odysseus tries to get back home after the Trojan War.

Ithaca Creek

Ithaca in Greece has one of the world's largest natural harbours and is famous in legend as Homer's Ithaca, the home of Ulysses, whose delayed return to the island is one of the plot elements of the Odyssey.

John Lyly

"This noble man", he writes in the Glasse for Europe, in the second part of Euphues (1580), "I found so ready being but a straunger to do me good, that neyther I ought to forget him, neyther cease to pray for him, that as he hath the wisdom of Nestor, so he may have the age, that having the policies of Ulysses he may have his honor, worthy to lyve long, by whom so many lyve in quiet, and not unworthy to be advaunced by whose care so many have been preferred."

Keyser Söze

Hanna M. Roisman compares Kint to Odysseus, capable of adapting both his personality and his tales to his current audience.

Maciste nella terra dei ciclopi

Queen Capys is doomed to a life of slavery by the Powers of Darkness until the last descendant of Ulysses is put to death to please the Cyclops.

Odysseus' Gambit

In 2012, Odysseus' Gambit was nominated for the Best Short Filmmaking Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

Odysseus' Gambit is a 2011 documentary film, directed by Alex Lora Cercos, about a homeless Cambodian immigrant who maintains his livelihood and sanity by playing chess in the heart of Manhattan.

Stephen Douglass

He was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor for his performance as Joe Hardy in Damn Yankees, and he originated the role of Ulysses in Jerome Moross and John Latouche's The Golden Apple.

Stereotypes of Jews in literature

Bloom is the quintessential Everyman, and takes on the venerable role of Odysseus in Joyce's saga.

Trofimena

When she had failed to win over Ulysses with her music, Parthenope died and her body was carried by ocean currents to the shore where the people discovered the goddess with closed eyes and white face, and took her remains to place them in a magnificent tomb accompanied by sacrifices and torchlight processions to the sea.


Aristophon

Pliny, who places him among the painters of the second rank, mentions two works by him: one showing Ancaeus wounded by the boar and mourned over by his mother Astypalaea, and another containing figures of Priam, Helen, Ulysses, Deiphobus, Dolon, and Credulitas.

Astyanax

In Jean Racine's play Andromaque (1667), Astyanax has narrowly escaped death at the hands of Odysseus, who has unknowingly been tricked into killing another child in his place.

Black Ships Before Troy

The main human characters are those of the original Iliad: Paris, Helen of Troy, Hector, Ajax, Achilles, Patroclus, and Odysseus.

Bow shape

There is an interesting section in Homer's Odyssey when the suitors attempt to string Odysseus' bow and are unable to do so, whereas Odysseus is able to string it without standing up.

Callidice

The Thesprotians, led by Odysseus and Callidice, went to war with their neighbors the Brygoi (Brygi, Brygians) and defeated in battle the neighboring peoples who attacked him.

Eric Gill works at the Midland Hotel, Morecambe

These were two seahorses, modelled as Morecambe shrimps, for the outside entrance, a round plaster relief on the ceiling of the circular staircase inside the hotel, a decorative wall map of the north west of England, and a large stone relief of Odysseus being welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa.

Homesickness

Homesickness is an ancient phenomenon, mentioned in both the Old Testament book of Exodus and Psalm 137:1 ("By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.") and Homer's Odyssey, whose opening scene features Athena arguing with Zeus to bring Odysseus home...because he is homesick.

Howard Clarke

He has also authored The Art of the Odyssey (Prentice-Hall, 1967; rpt. Duckworth, 19940); Homer's Readers: A Historical Introduction to the Iliad and the Odyssey (University of Delaware Press, 1981), he has translated from the Polish The Return of Odysseus by Stanisław Wyspiański (Indiana University Press, 1966); and he has edited Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Odyssey (Prentice-Hall, 1983) and Vergil's Aeneid in the Dryden Translation (Penn State Press, 1987).

Jonathan Liebesman

In early 2009, it was announced that Liebesman was attached to direct a new Warner Brothers film titled Odysseus, an epic based on Homer’s Odyssey.

Los Contemporáneos

La Falange (December 1922-February 1923), labeled a "review of Latin culture," and Ulises (May 1927-February 1928; see also Teatro Ulises), billed as a source of "curiosity and criticism," were two other short-lived, though influential, literary journals founded and directed by Contemporáneos.

Mentor

In his old age Mentor was a friend of Odysseus who placed Mentor and Odysseus' foster-brother Eumaeus in charge of his son Telemachus, and of Odysseus' palace, when Odysseus left for the Trojan War.

Michael Papas

Little Odysseus and the Cyclops is a modern day retelling of a story from Homer’s The Odyssey.

Nostoi

Neoptolemus follows Thetis' advice and goes home by land; in Thrace he meets Odysseus at Maroneia, who has come there by sea.

Odyssean gods

Odysseus meets Heracles in the Underworld and mentions that it was only his ghost as his immortal half was sent to Olympus where he married Hebe.

Odysseus Unbound

According to Robert Bittlestone's Odysseus Unbound (2005), written with the assistance of Professor James Diggle of Cambridge University and Professor John Underhill of the University of Edinburgh, Paliki, a peninsula of Kefalonia, is the location of Homer's Ithaca, the home of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey.

Philostratus of Lemnos

Written in the form of a conversation between a Thracian vine-dresser on the shore of the Hellespont and a Phoenician merchant who derives his knowledge from the hero Protesilaus, Palamedes is exalted at the expense of Odysseus, and Homer's unfairness to him is attacked.

Pseudo-Chalkidian vase painting

There is a single depiction of a chariot race, as well as one amphora with Odysseus and Kirke.

Ritratti

There are several literary references throughout the album,especially in "Odysseus", which references the Odyssey, the Canto 27 of Dante's Inferno, and "L'isola Petrosa", a poem by Foscolo.

Troy: Shield of Thunder

Shield of Thunder takes the reader back into the glories and tragedies of Bronze Age Greece, reuniting the characters from Lord of the Silver Bow; the dread Helikaon and his great love, the fiery Andromache, the mighty Hektor and the fabled storyteller, Odysseus.

Tryphiodorus

Tryphiodorus lists the heroes that entered the wooden horse, including Odysseus and Anticlus son of Ortyx, and tells how, when Helen circled the horse calling the names of the Greeks' wives, Odysseus had to strangle Anticlus in order to prevent his calling out.

Vance Astro

His ship, Odysseus I, was not equipped for faster-than-light speed; hence the journey to Earth's nearest interstellar neighbor, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system, would take about 10 centuries.

Where Troy Once Stood

Belgian lawyer Théophile Cailleux wrote that Odysseus sailed the Atlantic Ocean, starting from Troy, which he situated near the Wash in England (1879).