For Aristotle, true freedom and liberty consists in ruling and being ruled in turn and not always insisting on fulfilling one's own personal desires at the cost of others. Thus, for Odysseus, true freedom can only come about when one is allowed to contribute to society for the betterment of everyone involved, a sure sign of moral correctness and rational thinking.
In addition, Aristotle stressed the importance of justice and goodness, for he believed that people possess a sort of inborn knowledge concerning what is right and what is wrong; however, irrational desires often overrule such knowledge and leads people to commit wrong acts or behave inappropriately. This conflict of desires in human beings could be overcome by achieving self-control via training the mind to win out over primitive instincts and passions. Thus, intelligence is the finest human quality and the mind is the true self, the god-like aspect of every human being. In Homer's Odyssey, this Greek trait of intelligence is firmly entrenched in many of Odysseus's adventures, one being his clever manipulation of Polyphemus by getting him drunk and then blinding him with a red-hot poker which saved the lives of his men and allowed them to continue on their voyage home (Connolly, 265).
One other Greek trait is related to competition, something which Homer uses to a great extent in his poem. Excellence as a competitive value for Greek males like Odysseus of the social elite shows up clearly in the Olympic Games, a religious festival linked to a large sanctuary devoted to Zeus, king of the Greek gods, and located at Olympia in the northwestern region of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, where the games were held every four years starting in 776 B.C.E. The emphasis on physical prowess, strength and fitness and the public recognition by other men are closely linked to the Greek masculine identity as seen in the Odyssey. For instance, when Odysseus finally returns home to Ithaca and finds Penelope inundated by suitors in his own house, he kills them single-handedly...
For the most part women in the Odyssey are essentially one of three things: sexualized monsters, in the form of Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, and even Scylla; asexual helpers and servants, in the form of Athena and Eurycleia; and finally, seemingly helpless damsels, in the form of Penelope. To this one may add what is essentially the lowest of the low class within the poem, those women who are sexually
Odyssey Homer's Odyssey is a classic epic poem, demonstrating all the hallmarks of epic poem structure and the epic journey cycle. The narrative of the Odyssey follows the return on Odysseus from Troy, a journey that takes ten years and spans many locations and setbacks, until he finally reaches his home in Ithaca. Even then, Homer must deal with one final setback before being successfully reunited with his family. This paper
Homer was a legendary Greek poet who is traditionally credited as the author of the major Greek epics the "Iliad and the Odyssey," as well as the comic mini-epic "Batracholmyomachia" (The Frog-Mouse War), the corpus of Homeric Hymns, and various other lost or fragmentary workd such as "Margites" (Homer pp). Some ancient authors credited him with the entire Epic Cycle, which included other poems about the Trojan War as well
Comparing the divine world in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Wolfgang Kullmann emphasizes that unlike in the Iliad, in the latter, "men themselves, not the gods, are responsible for their sufferings beyond their destined share. Gods, on the contrary, guarantee "poetic justice" when they warn men against doing evil." As Kullmann points out, the mortals in the Odyssey are less likely to act as mere objects of higher powers that manipulate
There it is called the underworld and truly reminds one of the subconscious in many ways. For the Greeks, this is just one aspects of life after death.. In some sense it seems more closely associated with the Christian idea of limbo. Heaven has its counterpart in the Elysian fields. In the Inferno hell is again representing the subconscious, but in it's more visceral and active and judgmental aspect.
(Homer) Clearly, both Odysseus and Penelope are representing a conflict that most people will go through during the course of their lives. As, there will be times that: they will be away from one another and how they must not lose faith in themselves along with their partner. What the novel is illustrating is that, despite these issues there is a possibility that this kind of faith can be able
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