Odyssey

The Odyssey (Greek ????????) is the second of the two great Greek epic poems ascribed to Homer, the first of which is the Iliad. The book follows the events of the voyage of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, returning from the Trojan War, and the story of Odysseus son Telemachus who sets out to find his father. During two nights in the company of the Phaeacians Odysseus describes his adventures during the ten year-long voyage home, before returning to Ithaca. Once in Ithaca, Odysseus, after a twenty-year absence, reasserts himself as king of Ithaca, father of Telemachus, and husband of Penelope. In contrast to the Iliad, with its extended sequences of battle and violence, Odysseus is able to complete his journey using his cleverness, under the support of the goddess Athena. This cleverness is most often manifested by Odysseus use of disguise and, later, recognition. This disguise takes both physical forms (altering his appearance) and verbal forms (Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is No One (Outis) and later escapes after injuring the Cyclops because no one comes to help him when he yells that he has been attacked by "no one").

Derivative works

• The contemporary play Highway Ulysses by Rinde Eckert tells the story of the journey of a Vietnam veteran travelling to his son, meeting modern day characters akin to characters or monsters in the Odyssey (including the Sirens and Cyclops).
• Some of the tales of Sindbad the Sailor from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) were taken from Homer's Odyssey.
• A modern book inspired by the Odyssey is James Joyce's Ulysses (1922).
• Nikos Kazantzakis wrote ', a 33,333 line epic poem which continues Odysseus' journeys past the point of his arrival in Ithaca.
• Andrew Lang and H. Rider Haggard collaborated on The World's Desire in which Odysseus and Helen meet in Egypt at the time of the Exodus.
• The movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? has the basic plot of The Odyssey; Joel and Ethan Coen admit to basing the movie loosely on The Odyssey but insist that they haven't read it.
• R.A. Lafferty retold the story in a science fiction setting in his novel Space Chantey.
• Progressive metal group Symphony X based a 24-minute epic track The Odyssey on the story in their 2002 album, The Odyssey.
• The Japanese - French animated cartoon Ulysses 31 featured a science-fiction tale of a hero trying to get back to his wife Penelope.
• The first half of Virgil's Aeneid parallels the Odyssey in structure.
• Ulysses, a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
• Tank Girl: Odyssey borrows freely and irrevently from Homer and James Joyce's Ulysses, casting targets in the contemporary media as the trials the heroine must overcome to get back to her mutant kangaroo boyfriend.

Related Topics:
The Wizard of Oz - Star Wars

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