Odysseus
oh-DISS-yoos
Attested elsewhere in ancient sourcesThe one Homeric hero praised for thinking rather than fighting. The Iliad gives him the night raid and the embassy; the Odyssey gives him ten years of getting home by lying well.
The dog Argos, who knows him after twenty years and dies once he has, is the scene most often cited from the poem, and the nearest thing in Homer to the hound that finds Acenes.
He matters to the agoge in a way Achilles does not. A boy taught to steal and not be caught is being trained toward Odysseus.
Sources
- Hom. Od. 17.290-327
- Hom. Il. 10
- Hom. Il. 9.225-306
References are to the standard divisions of the ancient texts, not to any one edition.
Acenes of Sparta: The Dragon Slayer
A dragon is the reason the 300 died. Leonidas used the magic of the gods to bind Kalaxes beneath Taygetus, and the price was his life and his men's. Sixty-two years later a seven-year-old of the agoge falls into the dragon's crypt and inherits the unpaid balance.
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