Awesome / The Odyssey

• The utter brilliance of Odysseus's plan for breaking the siege is one of the moments that truly show him as the most brilliant of the Greek heroes. We may laugh at the idiocy of the Trojans for falling for such an obvious ploy, but they lived during the bronze age and definitely didn't have the benefit of thousands of years of Pop-Cultural Osmosis.
  • The horse was a symbol of Poseidon, the protector God of Troy, so the Trojans had a Morton's Fork where they could please Poseidon by taking in the suspicious wooden horse the Greeks left behind... or keep it out of the city walls and risk the wrath of Poseidon. Which makes Odysseus's trick even more brilliant. That said, it’s probably one of the underlying reasons why Poseidon gives him such a hard time in this story.
• Penelope fending off the suitors with various tricks. The best known is when she tells them she'll choose a suitor once she's finished weaving a burial shroud for Odysseus's father Laërtes... And then every night she undoes her work. She fools them for three years straight and would have continued had an unfaithful servant not revealed her game.
• Odysseus escaping from the Cyclops. Before the Cyclops went to sleep, Odysseus told it "I am No One." While it was asleep, Odysseus and his men blinded it with a flaming stake, then ran away. The Cyclops began yelling and when the other Cyclopes called out to him to ask what was wrong, he said: "No One is hurting me!" Thinking that "no one" was hurting him, i.e. that he was all right, the other Cyclopes never came to help, and Odysseus got away safely.
  • And after that? He taunted the Cyclops as they sailed away. Unfortunately, he gave away his real name while doing so, thus allowing the Cyclops to invoke his father, Poseidon, upon Odysseus.
• In Chapter 14, Hera asks Sleep (Hypnos) to put Zeus to, well, sleep for her. He recounts what happened the last time he did that—namely, Zeus woke up, realized what had happened, and was about to drown Sleep when Night (Nyx, Sleep's mom) steps in. And Zeus is so afraid to do anything that might piss Night off that he backs down.
• Athena's awesome and terrifying Mind Rape of the suitors' heads.
• Penelope setting up the archery contest, fully knowing the suitors won't be able to even string the bow (and may even injure themselves trying) and staying there to enjoy the show while they try and fail. The only thing she didn't plan for that day... Was for Odysseus to be there in disguise and solve her problem for good.
  • Odysseus effortlessly strings his bow after all the suitors have tried and failed, then passes Penelope's test by shooting an arrow through twelve axe handles, all while disguised as a beggar. He then reveals himself to the stunned suitors and proceeds to slaughter them like the dogs they are.
  • Why they fail: when Odysseus strings the bow the description is that of stringing a recurve bow, a weapon that required both strength and skill to be strung, and the knowledge to tell an unstrung recurve bow from a more common straight bow (at rest they're almost identical). And while the suitors couldn't even tell it wasn't a straight bow, Odysseus had the strength and the skill.
    • And that makes Telemachus almost succeeding an awesome moment: during his three attempts, he figures out what he's dealing with and the technique out, without anyone telling him anything, until Odysseus stops him from the fourth attempt.
    • The fact that it is a recurve bow also makes Penelope's plan more awesome: the suitors had been previously fooled by her tricks and the famous shroud job in particular... And here she shows up with an unstrung recurve bow that she knows the suitors won't even recognize or ask her if Odysseus's bow has some trick, fooling them once again.
  • A subtle one for Antinous: while he couldn't recognize it was a recurve bow, he could remember it was Apollo's feast... And warn everyone to not anger the God of Archery, suggesting to instead leave the axes in place, wait for the next day, make offerings to Apollo, and then try Penelope's test. He's wrong, but he at least showed more wisdom than the others... And that's why Odysseus kills him first.
• When Odysseus finally reveals himself to the suitors who have taken over his house while he was away on his voyage, he gives a bone-chillingly epic speech that makes all the abuse he took leading up to it worth it:
  "You yellow dogs, you thought I'd never make it
  back from the land of Troy. You took my house to plunder,
  twisted my maids to serve your beds. You dared
  bid for my wife while I was still alive.
  Contempt was all you had for the gods who rule wide heaven,
  contempt for what men say of you hereafter.
  Your last hour has come. You die in blood."
• This Pre-Mortem One-Liner from the 1997 TV series:
  Odysseus: "Telemachus, now is the right time for your anger."
  • There's also this exchange that demonstrates that nothing the suitors say will save them from the returned king nor his livid son:
  Eurymachus: Wait! Wait! Wait! W-wait! What is our crime? We treated your wife as a queen. We lived off your land, but that can be replaced. We did not kill anyone.
  Odysseus: Your crime is that you tried to steal my world. The world that I built with my hands, and my sweat...
  Eurymachus: Now anyone-
  Odysseus: ...and my blood. The world I shared with a woman who bore me my son. And no one will ever take that from me. Now you will die to a man in a river of blood...
• Athena helps in the final battle against Penelope's Unwanted Harem by flashing her terrifying aegis to them.
• Once Odysseus has killed the suitors, Penelope wonders if it's a god in disguise... So she orders to move Odysseus's bed dragged from the bridal chamber—causing Odysseus to demand who dared to cut the bed from the living olive tree he carved it from, something only the two of them knew. Thus, tricking the world's greatest trickster into proving his identity while she proved her fidelity to him in a single move.

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