Editing Polites (friend of Odysseus) (section)

== Mythology ==
Polites was a member of Odysseus's crew.<ref>[[Homer]], ''[[Odyssey]]'' 10.224</ref> Odysseus refers to him as his dearest friend, though he is only mentioned twice. It is unclear whether he was killed by [[Scylla]] or by the lightning bolt that [[Zeus]] hurled at Odysseus's ship.

Polites features more prominently in some versions of the folk tale known as [[Temesa (ancient city)#The Hero of Temesa|The Hero of Temesa]], which recounts the tale of one of Odysseus's crew (in some sources unnamed, but in others, including in the retelling by [[Strabo]],<ref>{{cite book | author=Strabo | author-link=Strabo | year=1924 | editor-last=Jones | editor-first=H. L. | title=[[Geographica|Geography]] | volume=3 | location=Cambridge, Massachusetts | publisher=Harvard University Press | isbn=978-0-674-99201-6 }}</ref> identified as Polities) who was killed on the island of [[Temesa (ancient city)|Temesa]] and returned as a vengeful ghost. Various sources give different accounts of the death—some say he was stoned after raping a woman, others simply claim he was murdered by the locals—but in all versions, the ghost threatened the populace and extracted a high tribute in exchange for a more peaceful coexistence until he was defeated by a visitor to the island, sometimes identified as Euthymus of Locri, a [[Ancient Greek boxing|boxer]] and [[Ancient Olympic Games|Olympic]] victor.<ref>{{cite journal | last=Nicholson | first=Nigel | year=2013 | title=Cultural Studies, Oral Tradition, and the Promise of Intertextuality | journal=American Journal of Philology | volume=134 | issue=1 | pages=9–21 | doi=10.1353/ajp.2013.0006 }}</ref> Because the ghost is sometimes described as wearing a wolfskin, scholar David Odgen speculates that "we are probably dealing with a monster that is mixanthropic: partly human and partly animal, a wolf-man..." and thus an early classical example of a [[werewolf]] story.<ref>{{cite book | last = Ogden| first = David | title = The Werewolf in the Ancient World | publisher = Oxford University Press| date = March 7, 2021| pages = 137–166| language = English| isbn = 978-0198854319}}</ref>