My name is Oddyseus. (Ulysses in Latin) I am the son of Laertes and ruler of the island kingdom of Ithaca. I was one of the most prominent Greek leaders in the Trojan War and was the hero of Homer's Odyssey. I am known for my cleverness, cunning and eloquence as a speaker.I was one of the original suitors of Helen of Troy. When Menelaus succeeded in winning Helen's hand in marriage, it was I who advised him to get the other suitors to swear to defend his marriage rights. However, when Menelaus called on the suitors to help him bring Helen back from Troy, I was reluctant to make good on my oath. I pretended to have gone mad, plowing my fields and sowing salt instead of grain. Palamedes placed my infant son in front of the plow and I revealed my sanity when I turned aside to avoid injuring the child.However reluctant I may have been to join the expedition, I fought heroically in the Trojan War, refusing to leave the field when the Greek troops were being routed by the Trojans and leading a daring nocturnal raid in company with Diomedes. I was also the originator of the Trojan horse, the strategem by which the Greeks were finally able to take the city of Troy itself. After the death of Achilles, I and Ajax competed for Achilles' magnificent armor; when my eloquence caused the Greeks to award the prize to me, Ajax went mad and killed himself.My return from Troy, chronicled in the Odyssey, took ten years and was beset by perils and misfortune. I freed my men from the pleasure-giving drugs of the Lotus-Eaters, rescued them from the cannibalism of the Cyclopes and the enchantments of Circe. I braved the terrors of the underworld with them, and while in the land of the dead Hades allowed Thiresias, my mother, Ajax and others to give me adivice on my next journey. They gave me important advice about the cattle of the sun (which Apollo herds), Scylla and Charybdis and the Sirens. From there on the travels were harder for me but they would have been much worse of it wasn't for the help of the dead.With this newly acquired knowledge, I steered us past the perils of the Sirens and of Scylla and Charybdis. I could not save them from their final folly, however, when they violated divine commandments by slaughtering and eating the cattle of the sun-god. As a result of this rash act, my ship was destroyed by a thunderbolt, and only I survived. I came ashore on the island of the nymph Calypso, who made me her lover and refused to let me leave for seven years. When Zeus finally intervened, I sailed away on a small boat, only to be shipwrecked by another storm. I swam ashore on the island of the Phaeacians, where I was magnificently entertained and then, at long last, was escorted home to Ithaca.There were problems in Ithaca as well, however. During my twenty-year absence, my wife, Penelope, had remained faithful to me but she was under enormous pressure to remarry. A whole host of suitors were occupying our palace, drinking and eating and behaving insolently to Penelope and my son, Telemachus. I arrived at the palace, disguised as a ragged beggar and observed their behavior and my wife's fidelity. With the help of Telemachus and Laertes, I slaughtered the suitors and cleansed the palace. I then had to fight one final battle against the outraged relatives of the men I slain; Athena intervened to settle this battle, however and peace was restored. According to the Literature of Dante's Divine Comedy, I now reside in one of the lower levels of Hell. "Eighth Circle. The fraudulent: Those guilty of deliberate, knowing evil—are located in a circle named Malebolge ("Evil Pockets"), divided into ten bolgie, or ditches of stone, with bridges spanning the ditches: Bolgia 8: Fraudulent advisors are encased in individual flames. Dante includes Ulysses and Diomedes together here for their role in the Trojan War. Ulysses tells the tale of his fatal final voyage, where he left his home and family to sail to the end of the Earth. He equated life as a pursuit of knowledge that humanity can attain through effort, and in his search God sank his ship outside of Mount Purgatory. This symbolizes the inability of the individual to carve out one's own salvation. Instead, one must be totally subservient to the will of God and realize the inability of one to be a God unto oneself."
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