Polytropos

his multiple relations with anima, implied by the scar and the suffering that lie in his name, is the secret of his Therapy: Fictions and Epiphanies 91 epithet, polytropos, “of many turns,” or “turned in many ways” by which he is described in the very first line of the epic.

Hillman argues that polytropos encodes Odysseus’s anima consciousness — his multiple, differentiated relations with female figures — as the therapeutic secret underwriting his survival and his freedom from one-sidedness.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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Odysseus is called “polytropos,” a man of many turns—a good word for the path of soul. Demeter must seek her daughter everywhere and finally descend to the underworld before earth can come back to life.

Moore adopts polytropos as the defining emblem of the soul’s path — labyrinthine, multiply-turned, and fundamentally unlike the spirit’s single-minded ascent toward enlightenment.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992thesis

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Odysseus is the one hero—if we must call him that—who had differentiated relations with many female figures and goddesses, relations that furthered his journey making survival possible.

Hillman reiterates in Senex & Puer that Odysseus’s constitutive wound and his manifold feminine relations are the embodied ground of the polytropos epithet and of his anima consciousness.

Hillman, James, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting

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Odysseus weeps every day because he endures the load imposed by convergence; his tears are symptoms of immense internal pressure. He refuses resolution because the accumulated contents generate a psychic substance more valuable than immortality itself, earning him the title polytlas (‘much-enduring’).

Peterson distinguishes polytlas from polytropos, showing that while both epithets characterize Odysseus, the former names the capacity for sustained suffering whereas polytropos names adaptive, many-turning craft — a philologically grounded differentiation relevant to depth-psychological readings.

Peterson, Cody, The Iron Thūmos and the Empty Vessel: The Homeric Response to ‘Answer to Job’, 2025supporting

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much-turned, wily’, of Odysseus, Hermes and others (Od., h. Mere.), ‘many-shaped’ (Th.).

Beekes’s etymological entry establishes polytropos as a Homeric compound applied to both Odysseus and Hermes, glossed as ‘much-turned, wily, many-shaped,’ anchoring the depth-psychological readings in the term’s philological range.

Beekes, Robert, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010supporting

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the narrative of the poem can be seen as an extended balancing act between Athena’s desire to restore Odysseus to a place of honor and stability in his household, and Poseidon’s to curse him with eternal wandering.

The Odyssey’s editorial introduction frames the poem’s divine conflict as a structural tension between restoration and wandering — the narrative field within which polytropos operates as Odysseus’s defining mode of navigation.

Homer, The Odyssey, 2017aside

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