Ulysses

Homer's Odysseus acquired his Latin name through a detour that took centuries. The Etruscans, who encountered Greek colonists in southern Italy from the eighth century BCE onward, rendered Greek names through their own phonological filter. Odysseus became Uthuze and then Ulusye in Etruscan, because Etruscan handled the initial Greek vowel differently and softened the middle consonants. When Romans absorbed Etruscan culture, they inherited this already-transformed name.

Latin settled on two competing spellings, Ulixēs and Ulyssēs, the second eventually winning in literary usage. Livius Andronicus translated Homer's Odyssey into Latin in 240 BCE, the earliest known work of Latin literature, and used Ulysses throughout. Virgil gave the wanderer a starring role in the Aeneid, composed between 29 and 19 BCE, cementing Ulysses as the standard Roman form of the name. The Greek Odysseus survived in scholarly writing but became less familiar to most educated Europeans.

Medieval European writers knew the wanderer almost entirely through Latin sources, so Ulysses dominated European literature for more than a thousand years. Dante placed Ulisse in the eighth circle of Hell in the Inferno, written between 1308 and 1321, casting him as a figure of dangerous curiosity who sailed beyond the known world. Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote his poem Ulysses in 1833 to capture an aging king restless for one more voyage. James Joyce chose the Latin title for his 1922 novel to claim the full weight of the Western tradition, not to avoid the Greek.

The name has also moved into science and geography: the Ulysses space probe launched in 1990 studied the sun's polar regions from high inclination. A Queensland butterfly genus, Papilio ulysses, carries the wanderer's name. Hiram Ulysses Grant had his name recorded incorrectly by his West Point nominator and carried Ulysses as his legal first name ever after. The Etruscan mispronunciation of one Greek hero's name became one of the most traveled proper words in Western history.