The Odessy

Question 2

Almost 3000 years ago, in what we call Greece, what was happening

Question 3

Who is the person credited with all of these stories

Answer 3

The person credited with later gathering all these stories together and telling them as one unified epic is a man named Homer (Homēros, in Greek).

Question 4

What are Homer;s stories called?

Answer 4

Homer’s great war stories are called, in English, the Iliad and the Odyssey. (In Greek, the Iliad is Ilias and the Odyssey is Odysseia.)

Question 5

Where can Homer’s Stories be Traced?

Question 6

When did these battles take place

Answer 6

These battles might have taken place as early as 1200 B.C.-a time that was at least as long ago for Homer’s audience as the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock is for us.

Question 7

What is Homer’s first epic and where does it take palce

Answer 7

Homer’s first epic was the Iliad, which tells of a ten-year war fought on the plains outside the walls of a great city called Troy (also known as Ilion).

Question 8

Where can the ruins of Troy be seen and who was the battle between

Answer 8

The ruins of Troy can still be seen in western Turkey. In Homer’s story the Trojan War was fought between the people of Troy and an alliance of Greek kings (at that time each island and area of the Greek mainland had its own king).

Question 9

What was the Main Cause of the Illiad

Question 10

What was the Odessy About

Answer 10

The Odyssey, Homer’s second epic, is the story of the attempt of one Greek soldier, Odysseus, to get home after the Trojan War

Question 11

All Epic Poems in teh Western World:

Answer 11

All epic poems in the Western world owe something to the basic patterns established by these two stories.

Question 12

What are Epics

Answer 12

Epics are long narrative poems that tell of the adventures of heroes who in some way embody the values of their civilizations.

Question 13

How did the Greeks use the Illaid and the Odessy

Answer 13

For centuries the Greeks used the Iliad and the Odyssey in schools to teach Greek virtues. So it is not surprising that later cultures that admired the Homeric epics created their own epics, imitating Homer’s style but conveying their own value systems.

Question 14

When people think of Epics, what do they thinks of (YEAHHH INDIAN POWER!!!)

Answer 14

Still, for all the epics written since Homer’s time and for all the ones composed before it, when people in the Western world think of the word epic, they think primarily of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Rome’s Aeneid, France’s Song of Roland, Italy’s The Divine Comedy, the ancient Mesopotamian tale of Gilgamesh, India’s Mahabharata and Ramayana, Mali’s Sundiata-all are great stories in the epic tradition. But Homer’s epics are at the heart of the epic tradition.

Question 15

How has the Theme of JOURNEY been used in American literature

Answer 15

The theme of the journey has been basic in Western literature-it is found in fairy tales, in such novels as The Incredible Journey, Moby-Dick, and The Hobbit, and in such movies as The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars. Thus, the Odyssey was probably Homer’s most influential story.

Question 16

Where is the background for the Odessy Found?

Answer 16

The background for Odysseus’s story is found in the Iliad, which is set in the tenth and final year of the Trojan War.

Question 17

According the the Illiad, why did the Greeks attack troy?

Answer 17

According to the Iliad, the Greeks attacked Troy to avenge the insult suffered by Menelaus, king of Sparta, when his wife, Helen, ran off with Paris, a young prince of Troy. The Greek kings banded together under the leadership of Agamemnon, the brother of Menelaus. In a thousand ships, they sailed across the Aegean Sea and laid siege to the walled city of Troy.

Question 18

What would the listeners have known about the EPIC the Odessy

Question 19

The Audience would havealso heard?

Question 20

Who was the hero in this story?

Question 21

In Homers Day, what were Heros thought of as?

Answer 21

In Homer’s day, heroes were thought of as a special class of aristocrats. They were placed somewhere between the gods and ordinary human beings. Heroes experienced pain and death, but they were always sure of themselves, always “on top of the world.”

Question 22

How is Odysseus differernt from other heros

Answer 22

Odysseus is different. He is a hero in trouble. We can relate to Odysseus because like him we also face a world of difficult choices. Like Odysseus we have to cope with unfair authority figures. Like him we have to work very hard to get what we want.

Question 23

What is the Odysseus story marked by

Answer 23

The Odyssey is a story marked by melancholy and a feeling of postwar cynicism and doubt. Odysseus was a great soldier, but his war record is not of interest to the monsters that populate the world of his wanderings. Even the people of his home island, Ithaca, seem to lack respect for him. It is as if society were saying to the returning hero, “You were a great soldier once-or so they say-but times have changed. This is a difficult world, and we have more important things to think about than your record.”

Question 24

What happened before the war

Question 25

What was some other info about Odysseus? Why did he not want to go to war?

Question 26

In the End, why did did Odysseus have to go to war

Question 27

What was the Wooden Horse Trick

Answer 27

Once in Troy, Odysseus performed extremely well as a soldier and commander. It was he, for example, who thought of the famous wooden-horse trick that would lead to the downfall of Troy. For ten years the Greeks had been fighting the Trojans, but they were fighting outside Troy’s massive walls. They had been unable to break through the walls and enter the city. Odysseus’s plan was to build an enormous wooden horse and hide a few Greek soldiers inside its hollow belly. After the horse was built, the Greeks pushed it up to the gates of Troy and withdrew their armies, so that their camp appeared to be abandoned. Thinking that the Greeks had given up the fight and that the horse was a peace offering, the Trojans brought the horse into their city. That night the Greeks hidden inside the hollow belly came out, opened the gates of Troy to the whole Greek army, and began the battle that was to win the war.

Question 28

How did people act in the World of Odysseus

Answer 28

The world of Odysseus was harsh, a world familiar with violence. In a certain sense, Odysseus and his men act like pirates on their journey home. They think nothing of entering a town and carrying off all its worldly goods. The “worldly goods” in an ancient city might have been only pots and pans and cattle and sheep. The “palaces” the Greeks raided might have been little more than elaborate mud and stone farmhouses. Yet, in the struggles of Odysseus, Penelope, and Telemachus in their “primitive” society that had little in common with the high Athenian culture that would develop several centuries later, there is something that has a great deal to do with us.

Question 29

What are Odysseus and his family doing?

Question 30

What is a theme

Question 31

What are myths

Answer 31

Myths are traditional stories, rooted in a particular culture, that usually explain a belief, a ritual, or a mysterious natural phenomenon.Myths are essentially religious because they are concerned with the relationship between human beings and the unknown or spiritual realm.

Question 32

What is some information about Myths back then ?

Answer 32

This brings us to mythic and religious questions in the Odyssey. Myths are traditional stories, rooted in a particular culture, that usually explain a belief, a ritual, or a mysterious natural phenomenon. Myths are essentially religious because they are concerned with the relationship between human beings and the unknown or spiritual realm.
As you will see, Homer is always concerned with the relationship between humans and gods. Homer is religious: For him, the gods control all things. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is always at the side of Odysseus. This is appropriate, because Odysseus is known for his mental abilities. Thus, in Homer’s stories a god can reflect a hero’s best or worst qualities. The god who works against Odysseus is Poseidon, the god of the sea, who is known for arrogance and a certain brutishness. Odysseus himself can be violent and cruel, just as Poseidon is.

Question 33

Who was Homer?

Answer 33

No one knows for sure who Homer was. The later Greeks believed he was a blind minstrel, or singer, who came from the island of Chios. Some scholars feel there must have been two Homers; some think he was just a legend. But scholars have also argued about whether a man called Shakespeare ever existed. It is almost as if they were saying that Homer and Shakespeare are too good to be true. On the whole, it seems sensible to take the word of the Greeks themselves. We can at least accept the existence of Homer as a model for a class of wandering bards or minstrels later called rhapsodes (RAP sohdz).

Question 34

What is a Rhapsode

Question 35

How were Epics Told

Question 36

Homeric or epic similes.

Answer 36

These similes compare heroic or epic events to simple and easily understandable everyday events-events the audience would recognize instantly. For example, at one point in the Iliad, Athena prevents an arrow from striking Menelaus. The singer compares the goddess’s actions to an action that would have been familiar to every listener:
She brushed it away from his skin as lightly as when a mother
Brushes a fly away from her child who is lying in sweet sleep.

Epic poets such as Homer would come to a city and would go through a part of their repertory while there. A story as long as the Odyssey (11,300 lines) could not be told at one sitting. We have to assume that if the singer had only a few days in a town, he would summarize some of his story and sing the rest in detail, in as many sittings as he had time for.
This is exactly what will happen in the selections from the Odyssey that are presented here. We’ll assume that Homer wants to get his story told to us, but that his time is limited. We’ll also assume that the audience, before retiring at the end of each performance, wants to talk about the stories they’ve just heard. You are now part of that audience.

Question 37

What would it be like to see a preformance of an epic