The Iliad tells you who it is about immediately. The first line of the poem gives you the wrath, and the goddess who is asked to sing it, and then the name, Achilles, son of Peleus, before you have finished drawing breath. There is no coyness in it. The subject is announced the way a herald announces a king.

The Odyssey does something else, and it does it so quietly that most readers go their whole lives without noticing. Sing to me of the man, it says, the man of many turns, who was driven far and wide after he sacked the sacred citadel of Troy, who saw the cities of many peoples and learned their minds, who suffered much on the sea trying to save his own life and bring his companions home. Ten lines of that. A full biography in miniature, an invocation, a summary of the plot, a moral judgment on the crew who ate the cattle of the Sun and destroyed themselves by their own recklessness, and no name. The proem ends. The scene shifts to Olympus, and the gods begin to talk, and it is only when Poseidon’s anger enters the poem, somewhere around the twentieth line, that we are finally told who this man is.

The first time the Odyssey speaks the name Odysseus, it speaks it as the object of a god’s hatred.

I have come back to this over the years, and I no longer think it is an accident of composition or a quirk of oral formula. The poem is about a name: about what it costs to have one, what it costs to hide it, and what a man will trade for the sound of it in someone else’s mouth. Everything else in it, the monsters and the winds and the twenty years, is downstream of that. With Homer back in the wider conversation this summer for reasons involving a great deal of money and a very large camera, it seems a good moment to walk through the poem’s strangest and most consistent obsession, which happens to be one that our own century has arranged itself around without much reflection.

Start with the middle of it, at the Phaeacian court, because the situation there is genuinely peculiar and almost nobody remarks on it. A shipwrecked stranger washes up on an island, is found by a princess doing laundry, is brought to the palace, is fed and bathed and seated in the place of honor, and is asked nothing. This is the Greek institution of hospitality working exactly as designed; you feed the guest before you interrogate him, on the theory that he might be a god and on the sounder theory that a hungry man cannot be trusted to tell you the truth anyway. But it goes on for a remarkably long time. Four books. The court holds games, and the stranger throws the discus farther than anyone and still does not say who he is. A blind bard is brought in to sing, and he sings about the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles at Troy, and the stranger pulls his cloak over his head and weeps into it, and Alcinous, who is a decent and observant host, calls for a break so the man does not have to explain himself in public. Then, later, the bard sings the Trojan Horse, and the stranger weeps again, and Homer gives him a simile that will not leave you alone once you have read it: he cries the way a woman cries who has thrown herself across the body of her husband, killed in front of the city he was defending, while the spear butts come down on her back and shoulders and she is led away into slavery.

That is the comparison the poet chooses for the sacker of Troy, listening to a song about himself. He is made, in that instant, into one of his own victims.

And then at the opening of Book Nine he tells them his name, and the way he does it is the most self-conscious sentence in Greek literature: I am Odysseus, son of Laertes, known among men for every kind of cunning, and my fame reaches heaven. He has spent four books being a nameless castaway, and he has heard his own reputation performed by a professional for an audience that had no idea he was in the room, and it has broken him open. He gives the name because he cannot bear any longer to be a man to whom it does not attach.

What follows immediately, in the very next stretch of the poem, is the story of the one time he successfully gave it up.

The Cyclops episode is the most familiar thing in the Odyssey and I suspect that familiarity has worn the edges off it, so let me put the machinery back in view. Odysseus and twelve men enter a cave that is not theirs, help themselves to the cheese, and wait for the owner, because the owner is obliged by custom to give them gifts. The owner turns out to be a creature who has never heard of the custom and who responds to the lecture about Zeus the protector of guests by picking up two of the men and eating them. Trapped behind a stone that twenty-two wagons could not shift, unable to kill the monster because only the monster can move the door, Odysseus does the thing he is famous for. He gets Polyphemus drunk on unmixed wine. And when the Cyclops, in a grotesque parody of hospitality, offers him a guest-gift and asks his name, he says: my name is Nobody. Outis. My mother and father and all my companions call me Nobody.

The pun is better in Greek than it is in English, and it is better than a pun. When the blinded Cyclops screams and the neighbors come to the mouth of the cave and shout in to ask who is killing him, he answers with the name he was given, and the answer they hear is that no one is killing him; so they tell him it must be a sickness sent by Zeus, and they go home. Homer then has Odysseus say that his heart laughed within him, because his name and his flawless cunning had tricked them, and the word he uses for cunning is mētis, which sits one small vowel away from the mē tis that the neighbors heard. The joke is that the trick and the trickster and the word for the trick are all the same sound. Odysseus escapes by becoming a pun on his own intelligence, and the price of the escape is that for the duration of it he does not exist.

He cannot leave it there. This is the part that matters. Safely aboard, out past the surf, with the crew begging him to shut up because the giant has already thrown one mountain-sized rock that nearly swamped them, Odysseus stands up and shouts across the water that if anyone asks who blinded him, he should say it was Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes, who lives in Ithaca. Every element of that is necessary and every element is fatal. Polyphemus, it turns out, had been told years earlier by a seer among his own people that a man named Odysseus would take his eye, and had been watching for someone tall and formidable rather than a small man who talks well. Now he has the name. He lifts his hands and prays to his father, and the prayer specifies the man precisely, by name, by epithet, by patronymic, by island, because that is what a curse requires. A curse cannot be aimed at Nobody.

Ten years. The entire back half of the man’s life, the drowned crew, the seven years on Calypso’s island, all of it proceeds from a boast that bought him nothing except the certainty that his name would be attached to the deed. He had already won. He gave away the victory to sign it.

Once you have seen this pattern you cannot stop seeing it. In Ithaca he becomes a serial fabricator of himself, telling a Cretan tale to Athena, who is disguised and enjoying it, and another to the swineherd, and another to his own wife, in which he claims to be a Cretan named Aithon and describes with great feeling the Odysseus he once entertained, until Penelope weeps for a husband who is sitting three feet away lying to her. He is recognized four separate times in the second half of the poem and never once by his name. The dog knows him by scent. The nurse knows him by the scar on his thigh. His father knows him by the count of the fruit trees. His wife knows him by a secret about the construction of a bed. The name, which he risked everything to broadcast to a blinded giant, turns out to be the one piece of identification that is worthless in his own house.

And the name itself, when the poem finally explains it, is not a compliment. In Book Nineteen we learn that he was named by his maternal grandfather Autolycus, a thief and a perjurer of some renown, who arrived to see the newborn and said, in effect, that since he had come through life giving pain and receiving it from a great many people, the child should be called Odysseus. The Greek verb sits at the root of the name and covers both directions of the transaction, the hating and the being hated, the grief given and the grief taken. He is the man of pain, in the active and the passive at once. Homer places this revelation in the same flashback that explains the scar, so that the origin of his name and the origin of his wound are told to us as one story, which I do not think is a coincidence in a poem this carefully built.

So here is the bind the poem sets up. In the Homeric world the only afterlife worth having is kleos, which literally means what is heard, the sound your name makes in the mouths of people who never met you. Achilles chose it explicitly and paid for it with everything, and then, in the underworld, told Odysseus he would rather be a hired hand on a poor man’s farm than king of all the dead. Odysseus wants both. He wants to survive and he wants to be sung, and the poem keeps demonstrating that these two desires pull in opposite directions, that anonymity is what keeps him alive and celebrity is what keeps costing him his men, his ships, and his years.

The founding generation of this country understood that bind better than we do, and built a practice around it. When the argument over the Constitution broke into the newspapers in the autumn of 1787, almost nobody signed his own name. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay wrote as Publius, after the man who helped set up the Roman republic. On the other side came Brutus, generally thought to be Robert Yates, and Cato, generally thought to be George Clinton, and Centinel, who was Samuel Bryan writing partly on his father’s behalf, and the Federal Farmer, whose identity is still argued over, and Agrippa, and a dozen more. Some of this was prudence, since these were men with property and offices to lose in a fight whose outcome nobody could predict. But much of it was a genuine conviction about how public reason ought to work: the mask made the argument stand or fall on its own merits, forced the reader to weigh the reasoning rather than the reputation, and kept the debate from collapsing into a contest of characters. Franklin had started this way at sixteen, slipping essays under the print shop door as a widow named Silence Dogood, and he never really stopped.

The best illustration of the whole tension is Hamilton, who wanted fame the way other men want air, who could not let a slight pass unanswered, and who died on a sandbank in New Jersey over the management of his name. It was Hamilton who wrote that the love of fame is the ruling passion of the noblest minds. He published the sentence anonymously.

We have arranged things differently. We have built an apparatus in which the name is the unit of account, in which every opinion arrives stapled to a face and a handle and a follower count, in which the argument and the arguer are evaluated in a single motion, and in which anonymity is read almost automatically as cowardice or bad faith. There are decent reasons for that arrangement; accountability is real, and the pseudonym has been used to shield plenty of ugliness that deserved the daylight. I am not nostalgic for a golden age of masked civility that never quite existed. But I notice, reading Homer again this summer, that a poem twenty-eight centuries old is still the sharpest thing anyone has written about the specific vanity that our machinery is designed to farm, and that it locates the fatal moment not in the cave, where the stakes were life and death, but a hundred yards offshore, where the man had already won and could not resist putting his name on it.

The last word should probably go to the poem, which is wiser about this than its hero. Odysseus gets his name back at the end, in a room, from people who had already known him without it. That is the only kind of recognition the Odyssey ever treats as real. Everything he shouted across the water bought him nothing but weather.