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Ramayana The Iliad Analysis

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The Ramayana,is a Sanskrit epic poem ascribed to the Hindu sage and Sanskrit poet Valmiki. It is regarded as one of the two great works of Indian Literature, along with the Mahabharata. The Ramayana also plays an important role in Hindu Literature (smrti). It depicts the duties of relationships, portraying ideal characters like the ideal father, the ideal servant, the ideal brother, the ideal wife and the ideal king. The name Ramayana is a tatpurusha compound of Rāma andayana ("going, advancing"), translating to "Rama's Journey". The Ramayana consists of 24,000 verses in seven books (kāṇḍas) and 500 cantos (sargas) and tells the story of Rama (the seventh avatar of the Hindu supreme-god Vishnu), whose wife Sita is abducted byRavana, the king …show more content…

The Iliad is the epic story of the Trojan War, whereas Ramayana is the story of Rama’s life. There is no simple and direct comparison between the two rather there is a complex and confusing comparison between the two which forces us to unveil the truth. The first and foremost similarity between the two that we can see is the roles played by women in both the epics leading to dire consequences. In The Iliad, the war originated from a quarrel between the goddesses Athena(goddess of wisdom and battle skills), Hera(goddess of marriage) and Aphrodite, after Eris( goddess of strife and discord) gave them a golden apple, sometimes known as the Apple of Discord, marked "for the fairest". Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris, who judged that Aphrodite, is the "fairest” and therefore should receive the apple. In exchange, Aphrodite made Helen, the most beautiful of all women and wife of Menelaus, fall in love with Paris, who took her to Troy. Here , Eris became the root cause of the war as she wanted revenge because the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite had been invited along with the rest of Olympus to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis but Eris had been snubbed because of her troublemaking inclinations. Basing on this event it can be said that the war waged on Troy was caused by Eris and …show more content…

In the Iliad, after the tenth year, it was prophesiedthat Troy could not fall without Heracles' bow, which was with Philoctetes in Lemnos. Odysseus and Diomedesretrieved Philoctetes. Philoctetes then shot and killed Paris. Whereas, in the Ramayana Rama fails to kill Ravana with his ordinary arrows, but finally kills him with a magical arrow. While Valmiki's Ramayana narrates that the magical arrow was given to Rama by Indra, in other versions the magical arrow is hidden in Mandodari's bed chambers or under her bed. While Mandodari is engrossed in worshipping the goddess Parvati for Ravana's wellbeing, Hanuman comes to her disguised as a Brahmin. After winning her confidence, he tricks her into revealing the secret location of the arrow. Thus, in both cases a certain weapon was

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