What is the difference between odyssey and iliad

The Odyssey is not a difficult book to read when it is translated into English! Because we translate the text into modern English it can be a lot easier to read than Shakespeare! Personally what I find the most interesting about reading Homer is how much of an influence he has had on pop culture.

Why is the Odyssey so popular? The Odyssey is a classic that has more than stood up to the ages because it has tremendous appeal on 2 levels: It is a tale of action and adventure with monsters, heroes, beautiful seductresses, good and evil that translates perfectly to an audience raised on comic books and epic Marvel superheroes.

In what way is the Odyssey an epic? The Odyssey, like its companion poem, The Iliad, is an epic poem, meaning an exalted story of a warrior-like hero's journey and dealings with the gods, told in a formal poetic structure. What does the Odyssey talk about? The Odyssey of Homer is a Greek epic poem that tells of the return journey of Odysseus to the island of Ithaca from the war at Troy, which Homer addressed in The Iliad.

The quest of Odysseus to get back to his island and eject the suitors is built on the power of his love for home and family. Why do we read the Odyssey? Only Odysseus, of all his companions, was able to survive because he learned that he should pay attention to what the gods told him.

But reading between the lines of Odysseus's story, one can also learn what civilization meant to the Greeks. How do you clean a Kirby tile floor? What is the standard enthalpy of formation of liquid methanol ch3oh L? Is there something more modern or simpler about the Odyssey? The epics were different enough that Samuel Butler only partly joking proposed that the Odyssey was composed by a woman. The epics differences were sensed in antiquity as well. To pit one poem against another is, to my mind, to imagine a combat between day and night, land and sea, or life and death.

These contrasts can be seen as polar—opposites canceling each other out—or they can be treated as binary where one can only exist because the other is there first. But it may be best not to think of them at all in terms of opposition, but instead as contrastive complements.

This works on the level of content:. Indeed, at the times when the Odyssey threatens to sing of Iliadic material, the moments are marked as highly problematic. For all the years I have taught Homer in literature and myth courses, I have emphasized their complementarity in slightly different ways.

At other times, I have instead described the Iliad as a poem of death and the Odyssey as a poem of life. Together, the epics teach how to live and how to die. One is essentially and forever incomplete without the other. But in concert, they reflect on the totality of life. And I am so bold as to believe that this characteristic is part of why these two epics surpassed all others and survived antiquity: any other epic from their period would have been redundant. I spent the first decade or more of my study of Homer passionately dedicated to the Iliad.

I started working on the Odyssey primarily because I found students responding to it more easily than to the Iliad. I also grew more interested in how that epic engaged with other traditions, specifically those of Thebes and the so-called epic cycle. Homer wrote "The Iliad" first, so "The Odyssey" is a sequel with its own plot and character development.

Homer wrote both poems in the same narrative format from the third person omniscient point of view. The stories focus on heroic deeds, human weaknesses and the connection between humans and supernatural forces, such as Greek gods. The central characters in each poem beat overwhelming odds and face difficult challenges to complete their epic journeys. The main characters learn important life lessons along the way.

Both stories focus on a single masculine protagonist. The Iliad and The Odyssey are two epic poems with both similar and different styles to the structure of the poems, as well as each poem having the same gods incorporated into the stories intervening with the day to day lives of the mortals.

The epic poems, The Iliad and Odyssey, give scholars and historians an idea how the Ancient Greek lived their everyday lives. By reading the two "novels," the reader is able to experience the three thousand years old society of Homer. The various similarities between our society and the societies depicted in the Iliad and the Odyssey are surprising profuse. To name a few: the superfluous violence in Iliad and Odyssey, the characterization of Odysseus, the obscure use of narcotics.

Hephaestus and Odysseus seem to have the same understanding what is normal of a culture, society. The main personalities that will draw the focus in these novels are the heroes Achilles and Odysseus. Despite their differences, both heroes have their similarities as well, such as their suffrage through an internal struggle. Unfortunately the differences are more obvious.

Achilles vs. Odysseus The importance of the complex warriors, Achilles and Odysseus, in mythology is showed throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey.