Tell me, Muse, of the man of many wiles.

This line is Alexander Pope’s English rendering of the famous opening invocation of Homer’s Odyssey, in which the poet asks the Muse to sing of Odysseus, the resourceful hero of the poem. Pope produced a celebrated verse translation of the Odyssey in early eighteenth-century Britain, a major literary and commercial undertaking associated with the era’s neoclassical admiration for Greek and Roman epic. The invocation frames the poem in epic convention—appealing to divine inspiration—and introduces Odysseus by his defining trait: cunning intelligence and adaptability, qualities tested during his long, wandering return from Troy.

The line signals that the story to follow is not primarily about brute strength or straightforward heroism, but about ingenuity—“many wiles” suggests strategic deception, improvisation, and mental agility. By addressing the Muse, the speaker also emphasizes the epic’s claim to authoritative, inspired storytelling: the tale is larger than any single narrator and participates in a tradition of sacred or elevated song. In Pope’s idiom, the phrase casts Odysseus as a complex hero whose moral ambiguity (cleverness that can shade into trickery) is central to the Odyssey’s exploration of identity, endurance, and the costs of survival.