The opening of the Odyssey reads:
Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways
after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.
The poem thus opens, as is typical of ancient Greek epic, with an "invocation of the Muses": the goddesses of poetry and the other arts.
On a cultural level, this suggests that authorship was not viewed as individualized and rooted in personal sensibility. Instead, the bard served as a conduit for tradition, and authority was vested in the goddesses who spoke through the poet. This reflects the nature of oral-formulaic composition as improvisational and collaborative, with each bard taking traditional building blocks on the level of line, scene, and story, and assembling them into performances appropriate to specific audiences. The sense of the bard as conveyor of cultural tradition is emphasized by the initial reference of "polutropos" (meaning "skilled in...
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many ways," and translated here as "the man of many devices") in place of the name of theprotagonist, as this indicates that the story of Odysseus and the Trojan War was so widely disseminated that readers would recognize the character simply by his common epithet. This indicates that Odysseus stood as a cultural symbol for a certain type of cleverness.
Next, we have two religious references within the first two lines. As well as mention of the Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), we also find the term "ieros" (sacred) applied to the city of Troy. This suggests that the Trojans were beloved by some of the gods and that those gods would be angry at the sacking of the city. This foreshadows, of course, some of the major themes of the narrative, in which Odysseus struggles to survive the wrath of the gods sympathetic to the Trojans with the aid of other gods and goddesses (most notably Athena). On a larger scale, this implies a worldview including anthropomorphic deities who regularly intervened in the lives of mortals.