Poseidon is angered that the Phaeacians helped Odysseus and gave him so much treasure, despite Poseidon's grudge.
Summary: Book 17 Telemachus leaves Odysseus at Eumaeus's hut and heads to his palace, where he receives a tearful welcome from Penelope and the nurse Eurycleia. In the palace hall he meets Theoclymenus and Piraeus.
Summary: Book 12 Odysseus returns to Aeaea, where he buries Elpenor and spends one last night with Circe. She describes the obstacles that he will face on his voyage home and tells him how to negotiate them. As he sets sail, Odysseus passes Circe's counsel on to his men.
In Book 14 of The Odyssey, a disguised Odysseus spends time with his swineherd, Eumaios. Although the dogs nearly attack Odysseus when he first arrives, Eumaios calls them off. Despite not having much because of the greedy suitors, Eumaios is a hospitable host.
In Book 18 of The Odyssey, Irus the beggar picks a fight with Odysseus, who is still disguised as a beggar. Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and military victory, gives Odysseus extra strength. Odysseus breaks Irus's jaw with his first punch.
Summary: Book 21 Penelope gets Odysseus's bow out of the storeroom and announces that she will marry the suitor who can string it and then shoot an arrow through a line of twelve axes. Telemachus sets up the axes and then tries his own hand at the bow, but fails in his attempt to string it.
Summary: Book 16 Eumaeus thus goes to the palace alone to tell Penelope that her son has returned. When father and son are alone in the hut, Athena appears to Odysseus and calls him outside. When Odysseus reenters the hut, his old-man disguise is gone, and he stands in the pristine glory of his heroic person.
The next morning, Telemachus arrives safely and secretly in Ithaca. He directs the ship to continue on to the city while he goes to Eumaeus farm. As he leaves the ship, they all see a hawk with a dove in its claws. Theoclymenus interprets this omen to mean good things for Odysseus and his descendants.
BkXII:260-319 Odysseus tells his tale: Landing on Thrinacia Let me tell you the prophecies of Teiresias and Aeaean Circe. They clearly warned me to avoid the isle of Helios, who comforts mortals: here the greatest danger would lie. So, row the black ship on past the island.”
Summary: Book 19 Telemachus tells Eurycleia that they are storing the arms to keep them from being damaged. After they have safely disposed of the arms, Telemachus retires and Odysseus is joined by Penelope. She has come from the women's quarters to question her curious visitor.
Summary: Book 11 Odysseus travels to the River of Ocean in the land of the Cimmerians. There he pours libations and performs sacrifices as Circe earlier instructs him to do to attract the souls of the dead. The first to appear is that of Elpenor, the crewman who broke his neck falling from Circe's roof.
In this world, it seems that people always get their just deserts. Odysseus-the-beggar tells Eumaeus that he was born in Crete, the unlawful son of a rich man and a concubine. As a young man he loved adventure and war but not home and family: he won honor in battle and took a lot of treasure from foreign lands.
The war and his troubles at sea keep Odysseus away from his home, Ithaca, for twenty years. In his absence, his son, Telemachus, has grown into a man, and his wife, Penelope, is besieged by suitors who assume Odysseus is dead.
A few men try the drug and do not want to leave, but Odysseus drags them back to the ship. They sail on and dock in front of an inviting cave, where they search for food. There is wine, food, and pens full of sheep in the cave, but the cave’s owner, the giant Cyclops Polyphemus, returns.
As they pass the entrance, Polyphemus feels only the sheep’s backs to make sure there are no Greeks riding them, enabling them to escape. Next, Aeolus, the keeper of the Winds, gives Odysseus a priceless gift, a leather sack that holds all the storm winds.
She then uses her magic to tell them how to get home: they must travel to Hades and speak to the dead prophet Teiresias. In the world of the dead, Odysseus and his men lure Teiresias’s spirit with blood—a favorite drink of the dead—and ask his help. He says that Odysseus will eventually reach home.
The following story comes entirely from Homer’s other great epic, the Odyssey. Though Athena and Poseidon helped the Greeks during the Trojan War, a Greek warrior violates Cassandra in Athena’s temple during the sack of Troy, so Athena turns against the Greeks and convinces Poseidon to do the same. The Greeks are beset by terrible storms on ...
Athena’s anger subsides and her old affection for Odysseus renews, so she decides to set things right. While Poseidon, still angry with Odysseus, is away from Olympus, she convinces the other gods to help Odysseus return home. In disguise in Ithaca, she convinces Telemachus to search for his father. Telemachus goes to Pylos, the home of Nestor, who ...
Blinded, Polyphemus cannot find the men and finally rolls back the boulder blocking the entrance and puts his arms in front of it, figuring he will catch the men as they try to run outside. Odysseus has already thought of this, so the Greeks go to the pens and each tie three rams together.
Odysseus mocked him again, saying that not even the god of the sea could heal the monster’s eye. As the ship sailed away, Polyphemus called out a prayer to his father. He asked for Poseidon to avenge the attack by keeping Odysseus from his destination.
Even after Zeus commanded that Calypso release Odysseus and help him build a raft to reach Ithaca, Poseidon sent another storm to capsize him. When the Phaecians found the shipwrecked sailor and took him home, Poseidon destroyed their fleet for giving aid to his enemy.
Zeus struck him down, however, when he attempted to reach Olympus without being invited by the gods. Like Bellerophon, Odysseus attracted the ire of a god through arrogance. If he had simply blinded the cyclops and escaped, Poseidon would not have targeted him.
According to some stories, even after Odysseus returned to Ithaca the sea god was not finished with him. Later legends claimed that the famous sailor made a pilgrimage to appease Poseidon, but was eventually killed by a spear tipped with a poisonous stingray barb through the sea god’s machinations.
The plot of the Odyssey was driven largely by Poseidon’s anger toward Odysseus. Early in his voyage, Odysseus and a dozen of his men were taken captive by the cannibalistic cyclops Polyphemus. They escaped by fashioning an enormous stake and using it to blind the giant in his single eye.
Any scene of similar hubris could have earned Odysseus the enmity of a god.
A simple journey took ten years to complete, costing the lives of the ship’s entire crew, because Odysseus had angered Poseidon. Odysseus had attacked one of the god’s sons, but his true crime was an attitude of arrogant self-importance that offended the god of the sea even more.
The gods allow Poseidon to punish Odysseus severely for his arrogance, so Poseidon uses his incredible power over the ocean to teach Odysseus humility and respect for the gods. To unlock this lesson you must be a Study.com Member. Create your account.
Poseidon's anger towards Odysseus reveals a tension between the private and the public realm. As an irate father, Poseidon has a very personal, private grudge against Odysseus. Nevertheless, Polyphemus committed a very public wrong, violating social and religious law.
The Angry God. Just because the gods kept Odysseus alive doesn't mean they allowed him to skate. He did offend one of the most powerful gods in the Greek pantheon, or family of gods. Poseidon is one angry deity.
This is a sacred duty, because you never know when you're going to be entertaining gods in human disguise. Then, apparently, Polyphemus gets hungry and his Cyclopean savagery shines through. Instead of feeding Odysseus and his men, he begins to feed on them.
He mocks Polyphemus and reveals his real name. Outraged, Polyphemus prays to his father to avenge him.
As a Greek, son of a god or not, Polyphemus is bound to the sacred duties of hospitality: the requirement that a householder treat guests, especially guests in distress and seeking aid, with great kindness and respect.
To exact this ultimate punishment would be to suggest that only partiality matters and that no public rules, norms, values, or laws exist. It would mean that Polyphemus, the son of a god, can do whatever he wants, while mortal men like Odysseus must bow to their will. The Angry God.
There are so many ways this book can find a place in any classroom, but the target audience is middle school and high school. As part of a unit on Greek Mythology, this graphic novel would provide an engaging narrative of the classic tale of the Greek Hero and the whims of the gods. In my case, I convinced the other members of my sixth grade team to purchase a class set of ODYSSEUS: ESCAPING POSEIDON'S CURSE and use it as a companion text for our reading of the book, The Lightning Thief by Rick Reardon (which uses Greek mythology for the basis of the tale). As a final project, we looked at the map of Odysseus’ journey and then my students created their own Imaginary heroic journey, using Google Maps and Google Earth, and the Picasa image sharing platform, to make their own way back home, encountering monsters and obstacles along the way. (see the Heroic Journey site for samples and more information)
ODYSSEUS: ESCAPING POSEIDON'S CURSE gets high marks across the board: the writing is engaging and crisp, the artwork is detailed, and the story, of course, is a classic. This book is highly recommended for middle and high school readers, and perhaps for some advanced readers in the upper elementary grades, too. It should be noted that there is death and violence in here, but not the gratuitous kind. Men die at the hands of monsters and nature, and every decision by Odysseus has a price. It reminds us that we have a responsibility when it comes to our actions.
About ten years have elapsed since the end of the Trojan War, and it is observed that Odysseus who is seen to be the most cursed of all the present living things has been missing and many individuals supposed that he was dead. In the narrative, it can be seen that gods play a crucial role in the destiny of Odysseus as well as many other characters. Contrary to the suggestion by Telemachus that, “Zeus is who gives what
His journey is very difficult and he is haunted with the loss of his entire crew and seemingly impossible task of getting home to his family. While journeying homewards, Odysseus makes the mistake of harming the Cyclops, who happens to be Poseidon's son. Poseidon is so angry at Odysseus for the harm he inflicted on the Cyclops, that through the influence of all powerful Zeus, he punishes Odysseus along with his other children, the Phaeacians, who can be seen to parallel as well as contrast with the Cyclops. When he first sets out on his journey, Odysseus is setting out for war and by the time that war is over, he wants nothing…show more content…
It is here that Odysseus truly angers the Cyclops, by taunting him from safety on the deck of his ship; this causes the Cyclops to fire rocks at the ship, missing every time. When the Cyclops reaches his breaking point, he raises his arms up to the sky and prays to his father “Hear me Poseidon … if I really am your son and you claim to be my father grant that Odysseus, raider of cities, Laertes son who makes his home in Ithaca, never reaches home.” (Homer 228). Charles Segal states, “The spoken word of the prayer, the invisible and distant fulfillment, proves, after all, the more effective instrument of revenge.” (504). This highlights the fact that, with the wrath of the Poseidon placed upon him, Odysseus will have much more to overcome than just plain brute force of the Cyclops himself. Stavros Frangoulidis infers that it is this prayer that, “Marks the beginning of Odysseus’s troublesome journey back home and, therefore, his odyssey .” (45). It is at this point in the epic where the anger of Poseidon is unleashed on Odysseus, and from then on, the journey is nothing but a struggle. He is trapped by the goddess Circe, who turns some of his men into pigs. Then, he is forced to make a trip to speak to the
The Odyssey is the sequel of The Iliad and mainly focuses on Odysseus’s return from the battle of Troy to his home, Ithaca. Odysseus’s travels take him beyond the realm of the known world and he encounters many mythological beings, which he has never met before. Every encounter with these creatures in The Odyssey is full of adventures, twists and most important of all, life lessons. If we assume Odysseus’s long journey as our life
Although Homer possibly lived during the rise of very significant biblical prophets such as Amos, Hosea, Zachariah, Isaiah and Jonah, Homer writes his epic poem, The Odyssey , in a strictly pagan method. Both The Odyssey and the Holy Bible praise the virtue of hospitality; however, it is evident that the Ancient Greeks and the Hebrews have contrasting motivations for hospitality. Therefore, it is no surprise that Odysseus’ voyage home was epically
His travels are negatively affected by his dealings with Polyphemus, son of Poseidon, and are positively affected through his interactions with the goddess of wisdom, Athena, and the messenger of the gods, Hermes. Though Odysseus does not deal directly with Poseidon, he purposefully spends time with Poseidon’s son
The Odyssey by Homer is a literary classic that presents many themes about the natures of both man and god. Although the characters of the book display characteristics relatable to those of the people today, one of the most prevalent differences between the two eras and their people is the intense violence that takes place throughout the entirety of the epic. This violence serves several functions in the work as a whole. The violence that is enacted upon the characters of The Odyssey serve as a device