Most importantly, poets had to have the ability to select the right words and speech fitting a heroic poem. The Greeks believed the poet's skill came from the gods.
They would say he had the "gift of the Muse," one of the nine goddesses who ruled over song and poetry. The epic is a lengthy narrative of extraordinary deeds or actions. It usually tells of a hero who is larger than life and who embodies many of the values of the society from which the epic springs. Epics may also include supernatural characters. Typical scenes within an epic often include feasts, funerals, journeys made by the hero, or preparations for battle.
How the epic is told is just as important as its characters or plot. Epics have a formal, stately style and often include lengthy speeches made by the characters. Epics also have a distinctive verse form. Each line of an epic follows a set pattern of stressed accented syllables, or meter. Usually, one stressed syllable is followed by two unstressed syllables, and this pattern is repeated six times in each line, forming a verse known as dactylic hexameter. Theogony remains one of the earliest sources of information about Greek religion.
Rather than telling an extended narrative, as in the Homeric epic, Hesiod wanted to compose poetry that taught moral and practical lessons in a direct way. These tale-trackers—like their fellow diffusionists, who have been assessed by historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith [ 8 ] —are susceptible to overvaluing what they see as the source and to undervaluing what they see as the receiver, and therefore to asserting the superiority of the source tradition over the receiver tradition in the manner described by historian of religions David M.
Art historian Partha Mitter sees a similar obeisance to the supposed source in some of the reports of early Western travelers to India who recorded their reactions to the art there. Some even went so far as to find historical links with Alexander. The leaf of the fern is more fully formed than that of the higher plants which must relinquish the stage to the glory of the blossom.
Similarly certain forms of art, the representations of human beauty and the poetic genres of epic, lyric, and drama found their perfect shape among the Greeks. But, at the same time that the Homeric and Sanskrit poem pairs differ from each other in their culturally informed constructions of what constitutes an epic, these coupled compositions portray poetic kings in ways that evince intercultural similarities and intracultural disparities with regard to the representation of epic creation.
Thus, I will regard any patterns that persist across the Greek and Indian epics as ensuing from what Freeman and anthropologist Edward B. The grounds for such similarity among data likely to be historically independent are broader than those underlying data related through common inheritance or geographical influence.
Whereas genetic comparisons rest on similarities reflecting slight divergences from a single cultural source, and diffusionist comparisons are based on commonalities stemming from the sharing of materials across cultures that is associated with migrations, analogical comparisons are founded on parallels that transcend the accident of actual human contact.
Thus, in the apparent absence of intercultural interaction that could account for the connections between cultures, the analogical comparativist herself identifies those aspects of shared human existence that are most salient to the comparison that she has constructed.
But, at the same time, the comparison that she constructs must reveal something important about the comparanda. Her comparison must provide some type of useful information about the comparanda apart from their interconnection through a shared inheritance or direct influence. In my own independence study, I aim to interpret the poems by and about bardic rulers that the Greek and Sanskrit epics incorporate.
Is a fundamental trust to be found amidst the fears, anxieties and terror of existence? Is there some reality, some force, even some one, who speaks a word of truth that can be recognized and trusted? Religions ask and respond to such fundamental questions of the meaning and truth of our existence as human beings in solitude, and in society, history and the cosmos.
The particular ways in which singing kings treat these types of religious issues within the Homeric and Hindu epics clarify why the epics have their kings sing, and how the epics reflect in these royal songs on the religious reasons for their own invention.
This invention of epic in ancient Greece and India is understood best by an analogical comparison. An analogical comparativist, by conceiving of categories in an effort to fathom the flood of data before her, devises a way to view everything of interest to her, taking up the telescope of intercultural comparative analysis to see as a whole the components that a genetic comparativist would see only separately through the microscopes of intracultural contextual analyses.
In adopting an analogical approach, I do not deny that connections between ancient Greece and India at the microscopic level of linguistic genetics and at the readily observable level of geographical diffusion may lie behind, and thus account for, the epic likenesses reflected in the human analogies that telescopists draw when they peer from afar at the poems.
Instead I assert that analogists, who look through their telescopes at these texts as wholes rather than in parts, view something new about these works, by virtue of having a broad focus. This type of perspective is instructive even in instances where the objects of study have no common origin or history of contact.
Even though my study of the Greek and Sanskrit epics does not rely on their relation by inheritance or influence, I will adopt the aforementioned methods of geneticists and diffusionists as I consider the categorizations of these poems in their premodern and modern contexts. Classicist Gregory Nagy —72 has taken a similar threefold approach to different comparanda. Thompson , The stories of the Iliad and Odyssey had a profound impact on Greek society, including its literature, art, ethics, and even mythology.
Just as important, the epic poems helped to foster a sense of a common Greek heritage and identity. Homer was a critical influence in the development of Classical Greek culture. His poems provided a fixed model of heroism, nobility and the good life to which all Greeks, especially aristocrats, subscribed.
The Odyssey was intended for oral performance. The poem was likely transmitted through generations of oral poets well before it was written down. The book is also about the hardest lessons some men ever learn: self-control, trust and surrender. Having come to Ithaca, he drove away some of the cattle, and when Odysseus defended them, Telegonus 3 wounded him with the spear he had in his hands, which was barbed with the spine of a stingray, and Odysseus died of the wound.
Another version is given in Iliou persis, in which Odysseus kills Astyanax. When Odysseus left Ithaca for the Trojan war he was married to Penelope.
Not only did he cheat with Calypso in addition to Circe, but he stayed on her island for seven years until Zeus ordered her to release him. The god Helios threatens that he will stop the sun from shining if his anger is not appeased at this violation, so Zeus sends down thunderbolts that destroy all but Odysseus, just as Circe had warned.
In a nutshell, Zeus does two main things to Odysseus after the cunning warrior leaves Troy. Odysseus Has a Run-In With the Cyclops Monster When Odysseus and his men were on the journey home, they encountered a terrible storm which, incidentally, was started by Poseidon.
Poseidon was justifiably not happy to learn that his son had suffered in this way, which made him hate Odysseus even more. Odysseus murders everyone He reveals himself to two of his most loyal slaves, as well as to his son, Telemachus, who is by now all grown up.
True to form, murder only begets murder, and the relatives of the people he killed demand retribution; some of them even in get killed! Odysseus is not a hero because, he is foolish, lacks faithfulness and is consumed by his Hubris and selfishness.
Although he may be considered a war hero, Odysseus is not a hero in other respects. As they sail, Odysseus and his men are afraid of being eaten by Charybdis as she sucks in the water.
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