I need a quote from The Odyssey where religion and culture are being represented

There are, perhaps, countless lines from the Odyssey to which one could point and say that it shows both religion and culture. This is because these were not two mutually separate spheres in the Greek world, unlike in most modern Western societies. One of the most interesting books where this is visible is in book 9, when Odysseus and his men are in the lair of the cyclopes, Polyphemus.
One specific line shows the deep connection between religion and culture in the Greek world. When Polyphemus makes it obvious that he is not going to be a friendly host, Odysseus says to him "we are your suppliants, and Zeus is on our side, since he takes care of visitors, guest-friends, and those in need" (Od. 9.269-271). In this one line, the reader gets an impression of how religious views influenced Greek cultural practices; specifically, travelers and guests were protected by divine powers, thus it was most common to treat them with respect.
Other lines from this section are similar, and could be cited as examples of both religion and culture.


The opening of the Odyssey reads:

Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways
after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy.

The poem thus opens, as is typical of ancient Greek epic, with an "invocation of the Muses": the goddesses of poetry and the other arts.
On a cultural level, this suggests that authorship was not viewed as individualized and rooted in personal sensibility. Instead, the bard served as a conduit for tradition, and authority was vested in the goddesses who spoke through the poet. This reflects the nature of oral-formulaic composition as improvisational and collaborative, with each bard taking traditional building blocks on the level of line, scene, and story, and assembling them into performances appropriate to specific audiences. The sense of the bard as conveyor of cultural tradition is emphasized by the initial reference of "polutropos" (meaning "skilled in many ways," and translated here as "the man of many devices") in place of the name of the protagonist, as this indicates that the story of Odysseus and the Trojan War was so widely disseminated that readers would recognize the character simply by his common epithet. This indicates that Odysseus stood as a cultural symbol for a certain type of cleverness.
Next, we have two religious references within the first two lines. As well as mention of the Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory), we also find the term "ieros" (sacred) applied to the city of Troy. This suggests that the Trojans were beloved by some of the gods and that those gods would be angry at the sacking of the city. This foreshadows, of course, some of the major themes of the narrative, in which Odysseus struggles to survive the wrath of the gods sympathetic to the Trojans with the aid of other gods and goddesses (most notably Athena). On a larger scale, this implies a worldview including anthropomorphic deities who regularly intervened in the lives of mortals.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How does Bilbo show leadership and courage in The Hobbit?

In “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes that the “lesson” of her story is that “it is distinctly possible to remain too long at the fair.” What does she mean? How does the final section of the essay portray how she came to this understanding, her feelings about it, and the consequences of it?

Why does the poet say "all the men and women merely players"?