πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεὺς
On Odysseus’ associations with mētis, see on 10.5–9 and on 10.137 above. Polumētis ‘who is crafty in many ways’ is one of Odysseus’ most commonly used epithets. Other than Odysseus it is only used of Hephaistos (πολυμήτιος, Iliad 21.355), who is the god of a different sort of craft. (The English word ‘craft’, like the Greek mētis, encompasses both meanings.) Milman Parry says of this particular epithet: “δῖος and πολύμητις, for the audience, describe the Odysseus of all the epic poems which sang his deeds” (MHV 171). πολύμητις is one of the distinctive epithets of Odysseus, while δῖος is a generic epithet of heroes (see Parry MHV 145 for πολύμητις as a distinctive epithet, and MHV 84 for δῖος as generic). Parry writes:
Epic lines without epithets would have seemed to them like a heroic character without his traditional attributes. But even now, who among those of us who have any knowledge of the legend has asked why Odysseus should be crafty in this or that particular episode? Just so, Homer’s listeners demanded epithets and paid them no attention, showing thereby the same lack of exact observation that becomes a habit with the modern reader. And it is this lack of exact observation that explains uses of the epithet which appear to us unmotivated, because we look for their motivations in the lines where they occur, rather than in all the poetry Homer’s audience had already heard before they ever heard him sing.
Parry MHV 137–138
As we discussed on 10.3 in connection with the phrase ποιμένα λαῶν, the phrase πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεὺς can be used of Odysseus even in situations in which he is not being particularly crafty; the distinctive noun-epithet combination is, to quote the formulation of Nagy once again, “like a small theme song that conjures up a thought-association with the traditional essence of an epic figure” (Nagy 1990b:23). The phrase is not without significance in an ambush context, however, because Odysseus is a pre-eminent ambusher within the tradition as a whole. Odysseus is called πολύμητις just as he leaves his tent, which marks the beginning of what will become a spying mission/ambush episode that will prominently feature Odysseus’ mētis. Once that episode is well underway, Odysseus will be again called πολύμητις when he interrogates Dolon (10.382; see also 10.488, where he handles the horses so they are not spooked).