Homer is allegedly a blind writer, who verbally dictated his poems. There is a blind bard that also appears in the Odyssey. Homer composed the Iliad and the Odyssey in 8th Century BCE, and they were changed a lot as they were passed down verbally. His poems were most famous especially because they survived the burning of the library of Alexandra.
In the Odysseus which takes place after the events of the Iliad, Helen runs off with Paris a Trojan prince, Menelaus brother Agamemnon gathers allies and tries to go to Troy to get Helen back, but the war goes on for ten years, and then Agamemnon sees an concubine of Achilles and Achilles gets really angry and doesn’t want to fight anymore. Then things go bad for the Greeks until Patroclus Achilles best friend goes into battle for him, and then Hector slays and kills him. This forces Achilles to return to the war and which he kills many Trojan man and also slays Hector and drags his body behind his chariot.
Achilles returns Hectors body over to Prime Hector’s father after he begged for his corpses. In the Odyssey, Homer reveals that ten years later Odysseus is on island by Calypso and she wouldn’t let him go because she admired him. The God’s finally intervened and Odysseus went home in disguise, killing several dozen suitors who drank his wine and annoying his wife and plotting to kill his son, The Goddess Athena intervenes and restores peace around this civil of violence which seems ongoing. Odysseus is smart and would do anything to survive.
I think he’s pretty pitiful because he is over confident, clearly obvious because it took him 10 years to return home. He however is a hero because he is the favorite of the Goddess Athena, and he displays great ability Oedipus is King of thieves, and saved the city of destruction. Very interesting tale, because Oedipus takes on a mission to find out the murder of the old King Louis is still alive and is living unpunished. He then finds out that he is the one who killed Louis and married Queen Jocasta, and that Louis s actually his father and that Jocasta is his mother in which they have had four children together.
Which actually has much to do with Freud’s concept) Jocasta hangs herself, his two son’s murder each other and his daughter commits suicide. Oedipus can’t escape his fate, Freud’s Odeipux Complex which he states in Dreams, the fate to direct or first sexual impulse to our mother and our first hate to our father. Oedipus suffers his fate from nature of the universe. I can state that I have learned the difference between heroes during this time period compared to now. I also learned what an epic poem is and how poets, and barbs translated them. I also learned what and how stories were told to depict history.
I have had knowledge of these stories prior to this assignment because I actually participated in a High School Play to Odyssey One Literary work from this time that I can say correlates with Oydessy is the Sundiata. The author of the Odyssey is Homer, the blind poet of Greece, who is believed to have lived in the 8th Century B. C. The work deals with an event which happened after the Trojan War, specifically the homeward return of Odysseus, king of Ithaca and one of the leading Greek warriors. The Odyssey is, in short, a work of the Western world.
The other work, the Sundiata, bears the name of D. T. Niane. The author of the work, as indicated in the introduction, is Mamoudou Kouyate, a griot and citizen of Guinea, a former French colony in West Africa. It treats the foundation of the Mali empire by Sundiata, an event which occurred in the first half of the 13th Century A. D. Mali was an empire of the Western Sudan, a former French colony and now an autonomous country in West Africa. Though these two works belong to two different cultures, they share the same genre. They are epics. The Sundiata, like the Odyssey, uses formulaic expressions, though not to the same level of perfection.
Thus Sundiata is “son of Sogolon”, “Sogolon’s son”, “buffalo woman’s son”, “SogolonDjata” or “the Man with Two Names”. Sogolon is “the buffalo woman”. Maghan is “the handsome”. Sumanguru is “the sorcerer-king” or “the king of Sosso”. Alexander the Great is “the king of gold and silver”. Moreover, a whole sentence could be repeated. Instances are: “The silk-cotton tree emerges from a tiny seed” and “How impatient man is. The similarities shared by the two epics extend to the cultural division, even though they belong to two different cultures.
One cultural trait which is glaring in the two epics is the relationship between a guest and a host, alias friendship. The two epics emphasize the obligation of a host to treat a guest hospitably. In the Odyssey, Telemachus is entertained hospitably at Nestor’s palace; he and Nestor’s son receive warm hospitality at Menelaus’ palace. Nausicaa offers Odysseus hospitality at the beach and the hospitable treatment reaches its climax when Odysseus goes to the Phaeacian palace. Eumaeus, the swinehead, receives Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, hospitably.
Emphasizing the need for, and propriety of, offering hospitality, Eumaeus says: “My guest, I should think it a monstrous thing not to honor any guest who came to me, even one more miserable than you, because Zeus is patron of every stranger and every beggar…. ” The sorceress Circe, who violated the right of hospitality by turning some of Odysseus’ men into pigs, recovered her sanity later on and treated the entire party hospitably. The worst violator of the right of hospitality is Polyphemus, the Cyclops. But even Polyphemus was not unaware of his obligation to a guest.
He requested more wine from Odysseus, promising to give him as his “guest a special favor that will delight” him. It turned out that Polyphemus’ “special favor” was his intention to consume Odysseus last. In the Sundiata, the theme of friendliness comes into full play during the period when the hero and his family were in exile. In Mali, as in Greece, the right of hospitality was respected. To put it in the words of the griot, “everywhere the stranger enjoys the right to hospitality”. Though exiles and a political liability, Sundiata and his entourage were received hospitably at the royal palaces.
The king of Tabon, who did not wish to incur the animosity of the king of Niani, received them warmly and sent them to the king of Ghana with a letter of recommendation. The king of Ghana gave them royal treatment, declaring that: “No stranger has ever found our hospitality wanting. ” Moussa Tounkara, king of Mema, not only gave them warm hospitality but also appointed Sundiata his Viceroy. Even Mansa Konkon, King of Djedeba, who had been bribed by Sassouma Berete to eliminate Sundiata and was, ipso facto, hostile, entertained them for two months before sending them away.
Another cultural trait which the two epics share together is their portrayal of male-female relationship. Both societies are clearly male dominated. The world of the Odyssey is a man’s world. Women play subordinate roles as wives and mothers. Women are expected to be faithful to their husbands, though husbands are not required to be faithful. Penelope is an exemplary wife. She stays in misery inside the palace, longing for her husband, who has been absent for over a decade, and shunning her numerous persistent suitors. She would rather die than marry anyone else.
She prays for death “that so I may pass beneath cheerless earth with Odysseus himself in my heart’s vision. The world of the Sundiata, like that of the Odyssey, is a man’s world. It is, indeed, more of a man’s world than that of the Odyssey. It is the world of Africa, where polygamy is permitted. Sundiata’s father was a polygamist. He was, however, a saint as compared to the villainous Sumanguru, who would add to his harem any woman who caught his fancy, including the wife of his nephew, Fakoli. It is a typically male chauvinistic society, where the hero can tell his friend, Fran Kamara Below are my responses to the DB Assignment Questions: