Odysseus

Polytropos, “of many turns”: deviser of the horse that took Troy, blinder of the Cyclops, the man who heard the Sirens and lived, who refused a goddess’s immortality for a mortal wife and a rocky island. The Odyssey is his poem — ten years of wandering told in his own unreliable voice, then the patient, lethal homecoming in disguise, the bow, the hall cleared, the olive-tree bed known only to two.

Philosophy adopted him early: the Stoics made his endurance an emblem, and the Neoplatonists read his voyage home as the soul’s return to its fatherland — “let us fly to our dear country,” says Plotinus, quoting Homer.