A god who tricks people is a category. A hero who wins by trickery is a problem — for the audience, who has to decide whether to cheer. This page is about that problem, and about the fact that traditions answer it in flatly incompatible ways. For the divine tricksters, whose licence is a different matter entirely, start with Loki and Hermes or the survey of trickster figures.
The thesis, stated up front so the rest can argue for it: cunning is praised when the audience identifies with the weaker party and condemned when the audience identifies with the injured one. The same act, the same man, and a change of sympathies flips the verdict. The proof is that we can watch it happen to one character over two thousand years of documented reception.
The reputation of Odysseus, reversed in slow motion
No figure in ancient literature has a better-documented moral career than Odysseus, and following it is the fastest way to see the mechanism.
Homer approves. The epithets are the argument: polytropos, the man of many turns, and polymētis, of many devices. The poem of his return is a sustained demonstration that intelligence is a form of excellence — he survives by lying well, by concealing his identity for most of the second half of his own epic, and by knowing when not to speak. Even so, the Iliad already contains a shot across the bow: Achilles declares that he hates like the gates of death the man who hides one thing in his heart and says another, and readers have been wondering who that was aimed at for a very long time.
The fifth century turns on him. Pindar complains that Homer's skill inflated Odysseus beyond his deserts and that a smooth tongue robbed Ajax of the armour he had earned. Sophocles' Philoctetes puts him on stage as a political operator instructing a young man to lie for the good of the army, and gives the young man a conscience so the audience has somewhere to stand. Euripides is harsher still. Within roughly three centuries the resourceful survivor has become the sophist, and it is no coincidence that this is precisely the period in which Athens is arguing bitterly about whether rhetorical skill is a virtue or a solvent.
Rome finishes the job by switching sides. The Roman national epic is told from Troy's point of view: its hero is Aeneas, a survivor of the sack. Virgil accordingly gives us dirus Ulixes — dread Ulysses — and calls him a contriver of crimes, and the wooden horse becomes an atrocity rather than a masterpiece. Nothing about the act changed. The audience changed.
Dante convicts him. In the Inferno Ulysses burns in the eighth pit of the eighth circle among the counsellors of fraud, and the charges are itemised: the horse, the ambush of Achilles, the theft of the Palladium. Dante then invents for him a final voyage past Gibraltar and a shipwreck, and — this is the extraordinary part — writes the speech that persuaded the crew so well that the passage has been read for six centuries as a hymn to human curiosity. He is condemned in a poem that cannot help admiring him.
The modern period rehabilitates him twice, on different grounds: Tennyson makes the restlessness heroic, and Joyce makes the cunning ordinary, transferring it to an advertising canvasser walking around Dublin whose great virtue is decency. The trajectory admired, condemned, damned, restored is not a story about Odysseus. It is a record of what four societies thought about intelligence used tactically.
Susanoo: punished first, vindicated later, never moralised
Japanese narrative handles the same material with a completely different rhythm. Susanoo begins as an offender — his behaviour in the heavenly fields is destructive enough to drive Amaterasu into the cave — and he is expelled, with his beard cut and his nails pulled, which is a formal punishment rather than a narrative comeuppance.
Then he goes to Izumo and becomes the hero of the tradition's most satisfying monster story. He does not defeat the eight-forked serpent by strength. He builds a fence with eight gates, puts a vat of strong sake behind each one, and waits for the heads to drink. The victory is entirely a matter of setup, and the tradition treats it as admirable without a flicker of anxiety about the method.
The pattern repeats in the next generation, with the roles inverted: Ōkuninushi survives a series of lethal trials set by Susanoo himself, escaping partly by ingenuity and partly by being helped, and the hare of Inaba episode has a creature punished for a clever deception and healed by simple kindness. So the material is perfectly capable of judging a trick — it just judges it case by case, on outcome and on who was hurt, rather than by a general position on whether cleverness is virtuous.
Jacob, and the deceiver deceived
The Hebrew Bible offers the most morally interesting version, because it declines to resolve. Jacob acquires his brother's birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew, obtains the blessing intended for that brother by wearing goatskins to deceive his blind father, and later out-manoeuvres his father-in-law Laban in a livestock-breeding arrangement that leaves him with the strong animals and Laban with the weak.
The narrative neither praises nor prosecutes. What it does instead is make him the victim of the identical technique: he works seven years for Rachel and is given Leah under a veil, and the man who impersonated an elder sibling is handed an elder sibling in the dark. The symmetry is clearly deliberate, and it is a form of judgement without a verdict. He ends up wrestling through a night at the Jabbok ford, renamed as the eponym of a whole people, and walking away permanently lame. Cunning is what he is, it is how the line continues, and it costs him a hip.
That combination — indispensable, unpunished, and marked — has no exact parallel in the Greek material, and it is worth registering that this is a scriptural text for living communities and not a myth in the museum sense. It is being compared here as literature.
Anansi, and a caution about the word "trickster"
The spider of Akan storytelling belongs to a different structural type, and the difference matters more than the resemblance. Odysseus is a king, a warrior and a fleet commander who happens to be clever. Anansi is small, weak and physically negligible, and cunning is the only resource he has. His most famous exploit is a purchase: he acquires the sky god's collection of stories by capturing creatures nobody else could catch, after which the stories bear his name. A hero who wins by wits despite power is admired conditionally. A hero who wins by wits because he has no power is admired unconditionally — and it is not hard to see why that second type travelled with enslaved people across the Atlantic and stayed alive in the Caribbean and the American South, where the tales of a small clever animal outwitting a large strong one continued under other names.
Two honest caveats. First, this is a living oral tradition with a continuous present, not an ancient corpus, and it deserves better than a paragraph in a comparison — treat what is written here as a signpost. Second, and more important for anyone reading widely: "the trickster" as a universal archetype is a twentieth-century construction and should be handled with tongs. Paul Radin's study built the concept largely from a single North American cycle and published it alongside commentaries by Jung and Kerényi, which fixed it in the popular mind as an archetype of the psyche rather than as a description of some stories. Later folklorists have pointed out that the category lumps together a Norse shape-changer with a legal role in the pantheon, a Greek god of boundaries and commerce, an African spider who owns narrative itself, and a Japanese storm deity with a shrine — beings whose functions do not overlap in any way that survives inspection.
The empirically respectable alternative exists and is unglamorous: catalogue the tale types. The international index of folktales has whole ranges devoted to animal-trick stories and to master-thief plots, and their actual distribution across regions is a matter of record rather than of theory. That is how you find out whether two traditions share something.
What determines the verdict
Four variables account for nearly all the variation in whether a clever hero is celebrated.
- Relative power. Trick upward and you are a hero; trick downward and you are a bully.
- Who is narrating. Greek horse, Roman atrocity.
- Whether the victim is inside the community. Deceiving a monster or a foreign king is sport; deceiving your own blind father requires the text to do something about it.
- What the society currently thinks of persuasion. Athens praised mētis and then spent a century frightened of what clever speakers could do to a democracy, and Odysseus's stock moved with the argument.
Things readers ask
Is Prometheus a trickster hero? He is a Titan, not a mortal, so he falls outside this page's scope — but he is the clearest case of a trick evaluated entirely by beneficiary. His theft is a crime from Zeus's position and a gift from humanity's, and the tradition simply holds both.
Do animal tricksters and human ones ever swap places? Constantly, and the direction is usually from animal to human as a tale gets attached to a named figure. Japanese material keeps both live simultaneously: the fox and the tanuki are trickster animals in the same culture that has trickster deities, and they are not confused with one another.
Was there ever a society that simply disapproved of cleverness in heroes? None on this list, and probably none anywhere — the interesting variation is not approval versus disapproval but where the line falls. Even Dante, who put Ulysses in hell, gave him the best speech in the canto.