A Spanish form of Ulysses, ultimately linked to the Greek hero Odysseus.
Ulices is the Spanish and Portuguese rendering of Ulysses, which is itself the Latin transliteration of the ancient Greek Odysseus — the cunning hero of Homer's Odyssey. The etymology of Odysseus is contested: some scholars connect it to the Greek odyssasthai, meaning 'to be wrathful' or 'to suffer,' while others link it to a word for 'journey.' Whatever its precise roots, the name has been synonymous for nearly three millennia with ingenuity, endurance, and the romance of the long voyage home.
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, spent ten years fighting at Troy and another ten years struggling home across a sea populated by Cyclopes, sirens, and the wrath of Poseidon. The Roman poets rendered him Ulixes or Ulysses, and it is in this Latin form that the name passed into the Romance languages and into literature. James Joyce borrowed it for his modernist masterpiece Ulysses (1922), mapping Odysseus's wanderings onto a single day in Dublin.
Alfred Lord Tennyson gave the hero a stirring Victorian send-off in his poem Ulysses, whose final line — 'to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield' — became a defining statement of ambition. The Spanish form Ulises (with Ulices as a variant) has been used steadily in Latin America and Spain, where classical names filtered through centuries of Catholic and humanist education remain fashionable. It carries the full mythic weight of its ancestor while fitting comfortably on a Spanish-language birth certificate, a name that sounds both ancient and alive.