Odysseus or Ulysses - what’s in a name?

Recent talk of Odysseus and Ralph Fiennes’ The Return brought to mind a book that I purchased as a schoolboy in 1974 from the Scholastic Corporation Book Club.

It was The Adventures of Ulysses, by the American author Bernard Evslin (who evidently adapted quite a few ancient myths for children), and — fifty years on — it still sits on my bookshelf.

Although Homer begins the Odyssey “in medias res” (“in the midst of things”) and incorporates a flashback in which Odysseus narrates the earlier part of the tale, Evslin had decided to tell the story in its correct chronological order.

In this, Evslin was simply following the simplifying technique pioneered by Charles Lamb in his own Adventures of Ulysses in 1808. But Evslin managed to make his version more exciting for Generation X readers.

A new retelling

At the start, where Lamb, following Homer, relates how the Lotus-eaters benignly drugged Odysseus’ men, so that, in order to escape, “Ulysses caused them to be bound hand and foot, and cast under the hatches, and set sail with all possible speed from that baneful coast”, Evslin devises an entire storyline of his own.

Under the influence of the lotus drug, Morpheus, god of dreams, interprets the terrible nightmares of the survivors of the Trojan War, and describes Ulysses’ own prophetic visions: “Look at that giant with the single eye in the middle of his forehead, and that terrible spider-woman with all those legs. Ah, the things he dreams, this angry sleeper. What bloody mouths, what masts falling, sails ripping, what rocks and reefs, what shipwrecks ... how many deaths?”

Beautiful illustrations

Part of the charm of Evslin’s book came from the illustrations, attributed to a certain William Hunter. (I would love to think that this was the Glaswegian artist William Hunter, but he would have been aged 79 when Evslin’s book was first published.) Each chapter has its own Aubrey Beardsleyesque pen-and-ink drawing, all of them utterly beguiling, and the book begins with a beautifully decorated map (see above).

But it would be wrong to ignore Evslin’s own genius for storytelling. Take the episode of the giant Laestrygonians, to which Homer devotes some 20-odd lines. Lamb, in a single page, relates how these giants “issued out at the gates and, making for the harbour, tore up huge pieces of rocks and flung them at the ships which lay there, all which they utterly overwhelmed and sank, and the unfortunate bodies of men which the sea did not devour these cannibals bore off to their dire feast”. Ulysses alone escaped to his own ship. But Evslin has a whole chapter entitled “Cannibal Beach” — a delight for a twelve-year-old reader.

Who is the hero?

It never occurred to me to ask why the Odysseus of my Penguin Classics Odyssey was here named “Ulysses”. And, down through the years — fifty years! — I have simply accepted that Ulysses was “the Latin form of Odysseus’ name”. So Agamemnon is Agamemnon, Menelaus is Menelaus, Achilles is Achilles, ... but Odysseus is Ulysses? Why?

The true explanation is complicated. It seems that, in the earliest form of his name, the D (Δ in Greek) alternates with L (Λ in Greek), so that the familiar Greek Ὀδυσσεύς (Odysseus) could appear as Ὀλυσευς (Olyseus) — as in this Greek “Skyphos” vase from the Oxford Beazley collection, showing Olyseus running before the North wind Borias. From Olyseus, it is a short step to Ulyseus or Ulysses.

In fact, the Romans more usually called him Ulixes! Strange but true. Meanwhile, Ajax remained Ajax, Diomedes Diomedes, and Nestor Nestor. But Odysseus became Ulysses.