Odysseus Coloring Pages
Welcome to our Odysseus coloring pages section.
This isn't the Odyssey. It's a page about Odysseus. The Odyssey is an epic tale of heroes and monsters and adventures. Odysseus is just one character in a much greater story than himself but saying that... not even the most epic of tales can entirely capture the essence of one man's life. In my opinion, meeting the man is a great way to start.
Jump to: The King | The Warrior | The Flaw | The Gods | The Dead | The Choice | The Survivor | The Reckoning | The Reunion
The Young King of Ithaca
Before any of it, Odysseus was just a young king with a small, rocky island to look after. Ithaca wasn't rich or powerful, nothing like Troy or Sparta, but it was his. He had a clever wife, Penelope, and a newborn son, Telemachus, and by most accounts, a life he was in no hurry to leave.
He was young and strong.
Happy.
Then came the call to war. Helen, wife of the Greek king Menelaus, had been taken by a Trojan prince, and the kings of Greece bound by old oaths rallied to bring her back. Some stories say Odysseus tried to get out of it, others said he grudgingly agreed. However it happened, he left his wife and infant son behind, took most of the strong young men on his island and sailed away to a war that wasn't his.
Homer's Odyssey coloring pages
Another Forever War | The Clever Warrior
Ten years of fighting outside Troy's walls had worn down both sides, and nothing... not strength, not numbers... had managed to break the siege.
Odysseus wasn't the biggest warrior at Troy or the fastest. What he had was a mind built for finding the one clever way through a problem that brute force couldn't solve. The Trojan Horse was his idea: not a weapon, but a trick.
Not everyone saw that kind of strategy as honorable. Warriors like Ajax had built their whole reputation on meeting an enemy face to face and winning through strength and courage, not deception. To people like Ajax, a trick isn't a very noble way to win a fight. Odysseus though... at this point he just wanted to go home, and he was willing to ignore the whispers of "noble" warriors.
A Flaw Takes Root
Low on supplies, Odysseus and his men found a cave stocked with cheese, milk and sheep, clear signs that whoever lived there wasn't small.
Cornered by a giant with no weapon that could beat him by force, Odysseus fell back on the only thing that ever really worked for him: a clever ruse. Athena would call it a wise strategy but Odysseus knew some of his crew thought of it as a cowardly trick.
But it worked... and with his second success, Odysseus pride grew.
Pride. Is it the true enemy of wisdom?
They'd gotten away... but for some reason I'm not sure even Odysseus understood he turned back to the Cyclops and shouted his real name defiantly.
That prideful decision would eventually cost most of his crew their lives and Odysseus ten years of his.
Odysseus and the Gods
The cyclops, Polyphemus was Poseidon's son, and the god heard every word of that shout. What should have been a fairly short voyage home turned into a ten-year punishment: storms, wrecked ships, island after island that wasn't Ithaca. Odysseus had made an enemy of one of the most powerful gods alive, and he'd done it for nothing he actually needed.
Through it all, Odysseus never stopped following the old rites. But the careful respect he'd always shown the gods was starting to curdle into something closer to resentment. He was tired of being away from the home he'd never wanted to leave and endlessly paying for one arrogant shout... tired of watching men who'd sailed with him die one by one for a stupid, stupid mistake that was his, not theirs. Somewhere in those years, the dutiful king who trusted the gods and their priests and their temples and their endless bloody rites began to wonder, began to lose faith.
Began to lose... hope.
Athena was a different kind of relationship entirely. She favoured Odysseus, admired the same cleverness that got him in trouble, and helped him again and again on his way home. But her help was never a blank check. She let him face the challenges without warning him first and without stepping in to soften the blows that just seem to keep coming. Even a goddess on his side wasn't the same as a goddess who'd save him from every consequence. Some lessons, it seems, Athena thought he needed to survive on his own.
They say whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger... is that true? Maybe it just humbles us.
Odysseus and the Dead
Digging a pit and pouring out blood to call up the dead wasn't the kind of thing the young king of Ithaca would ever have imagined himself doing. That man made offerings at proper altars and left the rest to the gods.
This version of him was standing at the edge of the world doing something closer to necromancy, because a sorceress told him to, and somehow that wasn't even the strangest thing that had happened to him lately.
Then his mother appeared among the spirits, and Odysseus reached for her three times, and three times his arms closed on nothing. There was no trick for this one, no clever angle to work. Just a man standing in the dark, finding out that grief doesn't care how clever you are.
Brave heroes don't cry. Loving sons do.
Achilles' ghost unsettled him more than he expected. Odysseus, half fishing for comfort, told him he must rule the dead the way he'd once ruled the battlefield. Achilles said he'd rather be a living farmhand than king of all this.
Odysseus had spent most of his adult life following confident men who sold glory as the ultimate reward. Hearing the most glorious man who ever lived say he'd give it all back for one more ordinary day...
Gods help me, brave heroes don't cry...
The Man Who Chose Home
Calypso offered him the one thing every mortal is supposed to desire: forever. Stay with her, never age, never die... immortality. No more storms, no more graves to dig for men who'd trusted him. Just an island and an eternity to enjoy it in.
He said no. Seven years was long enough to think it over, and the answer never changed. Not for a goddess, not for immortality, not for glory or wealth or... pride.
He wanted a rocky little island and a wife who might not even still be waiting. And a son, now a man, who he wouldn't recognize and wouldn't recognize him. Odysseus just wanted to be home.
Maybe heroes do cry.
The Weathered Survivor
I finally made it home.
Disguised as a beggar in his own home, he walked past guards, servants, even family, and not one of them knew him.
The only one who did was Argos, his old dog, flea-bitten and dying by the gate, who lifted his head after twenty years and knew his master on sight. Then he closed his eyes for the last time.
One more death in an endless ocean of deaths... would Argos be waiting for him in the Elysian fields at the end of his days?
How long have I been standing here looking at a dead dog...
The Reckoning
The suitors barely registered. Years of eating his food, wooing his wife, mocking his house, and in the end they were just one more obstacle between Odysseus and home. He strung the bow, dropped the disguise and with Telemachus at his side, cleared them out like vermin from a home that was finally his again.
It was over fast... Didn't even register most of their names.
Reunion
This wasn't happily ever after. Penelope looked at him with love, yes, but something else sat beside it, twenty years of loneliness that no homecoming could fully undo. Some things don't get fixed just because the story is in the last few pages.
Telemachus was a grown man now, a stranger. And the island kingdom Odysseus was handing his son wasn't the one he'd left: twenty years untended, worn down by suitors who'd spent it like it was theirs to spend.
There is no getting the years back.
An old man, home at last, with no way to undo any of it. Just whatever came next.
I'll leave it to better men to tell the story of my stories. Some bard or poet of the future. This little sketchbook isn't a reflection on my epic tale.
It's just about me.
Odysseus PDF Story and coloring page package