Troilus & Cressida: Odysseus as the Ancients Imagined Him.

Odysseus is best known as the hero of the Odyssey, an epic account of his efforts to return home after the Trojan War to restore his rule in Ithaca. Ovid retells parts of these journeys, focusing on his romantic involvements with the enchantress Circe and Princess Calypso. Odysseus's maternal grandfather is the thief Autolycus, son of Hermes and Chione. and according to The Odyssey, his father is Laertes (note ShakespeareÂ’s reuse of Autolycus as the rogue in WinterÂ’s Tale and Laertes as the naive brother of Ophelia in Hamlet). Homer's Iliad and Odyssey portrayed Odysseus as a culture hero, but the Romans, as supposed descendants of Prince Aeneas of Troy, considered him a villainous falsifier. In Virgil's Aeneid, he is referred to as "cruel Odysseus" because of his idea of the Trojan horse (a peace offering left by the supposedly departing Greeks in which warriors were smuggled in to subvert Troy). While the Greeks admired his cunning, this did not recommend him to the Roman sense of honor. On the whole, in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare presents him, as Ulysses, to be highly intelligent and fluent, but his stratagems are not very successful.

Pushkin Museum Bust Copied from a Roman Imitation of a Greek Original, in the Vatican.Picture (user:shakko) and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia)