Are Odysseus and Ulysses the same person?

One hero, two names

Homer’s poems call him Odysseus. The Romans said Ulixes: Virgil and Ovid use that form, and in book 13 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses it is Ulixes who argues against Ajax for the armor of Achilles. How the Greek name turned into the Latin one is still debated. What is clear is the route it took afterward. Medieval and Renaissance Europe read the Trojan stories mostly in Latin, so the Latin name won, and English made it Ulysses. It is the same habit that turned Zeus into Jupiter and Athena into Minerva, as in the Roman names of the Greek gods.

What the name means

Homer explains the name himself. When Odysseus is a baby, his grandfather Autolycus is asked to choose it, and he plays on the Greek verb odyssomai, to be angry or to hate.

I am highly displeased with a large number of people in one place and another, both men and women; so name the child ‘Ulysses,’ or the child of anger.

Butler has to explain the pun, because his Latin name hides it. The same verb returns at the very start of the poem, when Athena asks Zeus why he is so angry with Odysseus (1.62). The man named for anger spends ten years under the anger of a god. Homer gives him other names too: polytropos, the man of many turns, in the first line, and Nobody in the Cyclops’s cave, the false name that saves his men.

Why English says Ulysses

For centuries writers in English took the hero from Latin. Dante had already put Ulisse among the fraudulent counselors in the eighth circle of his Inferno (canto 26), where he tells how he sailed past the Pillars of Hercules to his death. Shakespeare’s Ulysses is the shrewd counselor of Troilus and Cressida. Tennyson’s poem Ulysses (1842), which grew out of Dante’s canto, ends with a line many people know without knowing its source: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

Samuel Butler’s prose translation of 1900 still calls the hero Ulysses and gives the gods their Roman names, Jove, Minerva and Neptune. Most modern translators use the Greek forms instead.

Joyce’s Ulysses

James Joyce published Ulysses in Paris on February 2, 1922, his fortieth birthday. The novel follows Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, through a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, now celebrated every year as Bloomsday. Bloom is a modern Odysseus, his wife Molly a Penelope and the young Stephen Dedalus a Telemachus. Each episode shadows one in the Odyssey, and Joyce’s working names for them were Homeric: Calypso, Lotus Eaters, Cyclops, Nausicaa, Penelope. Those names never appeared in the printed book, but the title makes the link plain.

In Brazil, Ulisses is the familiar form and a common first name, while Odisseu, closer to the Greek, is the one Herald uses. Either way, it is the same man, and the poem named after him is the Odyssey.