In Ovid’s Metamorphoses he is imprisoned with his father and his
Both Odysseus and I have shown cleverness in hard situations that have brought out that cleverness. Homer portrays Odysseus as a man of mind over muscle, although he has enormous strength, he always tries to find a way to get his enemies to make a mistake and exploit it. One such example is when he gets trapped in the cave with Polyphemus and two of his men get eaten. Instead of trying to fight out of anger and his first impulse of “drawing the sharp sword…to stab him,” he thought about the fact that there would be no one to move the boulder for him. As an alternative, Odysseus tricks Polyphemus into letting them free by wounding his only eye with a hot stick and drawing upon all his wits by sneaking out of the cave on the bellies of the sheep.
Animals in Semonides: Women in a New Perspective One of the best ways to describe something is by connecting it to what one already knows. The ancient Greeks in particular were very fond of utilizing metaphors and similes to discuss scenes that they wished to better convey to their audience. Some uses would just be nothing more than a simple line or phrase and some would be vast, extended metaphors such as those by Homer. Many times these comparisons were made between man and beast and, in this specific case, between woman and their animal kingdom counterparts. Semonides creates an interesting perspective in his poem Women relating women and animals by means of shared characteristics.
When I first heard Odysseus’ men outside my hall I immediately invited them inside for a bite to eat. Although my feelings changed over time, I felt quite threatened in that moment, with me being the only women there. Therefore I did what any smart witch would do a mixed baneful drugs into the appealing wine and cheese that I offered them. Eventually when they finished their meal I transformed them all into pigs, but left their minds untouched; even I’m not cruel enough to rid them of their sanity.
Oedipus the King is a tragedy that was written by Sophocles that emphasizes the irony of an irony of a man who was determined to trace down, expose and punish an assassin who in turn became him. Oedipus the King is also known as Oedipus Rex or Oedipus Tyrannus. The art is an Athenian play that was performed in ages approximated to be 429 BC. Oedipus the King would later in the play fulfill the prophecy that he would kill his father and later on marry his mother. There is a twist of an event in the play where Oedipus is looking for the murderer of his father to bring to a halt the series of plagues that are befalling Thebes but only to find he is in search of himself (Rado, 1956).
Ovid published a book titled “The Art of Love” to help men win over women they desired. This book gives inside on what must be done to win women, as well as the Ovid’s opinion of women. It also showcases the immoral he brings to the Roman Empire. Ovid believes that a man should focus on his appearance and his behavior to make women fall in love with him.
Imagine landing in a difficult situation... getting stranded from home, encountering beautiful woman at the same time, but you have a wife. You have to choose your wife, or a beautiful woman. This is exactly what happened to Odysseus on his travels in The Odyssey, by the Greek poet Homer. In this epic poem, Odysseus is married to his wife Penelope and has a happy family, who lives in Ithaca. Even though Odysseus has been stranded from home for many years, he still remains loyal to his wife.
Gregor Samsa’s transition from human to vermin was not the only shift that happened through the duration of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The novel is centered around Gregor who wakes up as a vermin, presumably a cockroach, which catalyses a series of emotionally traumatic experiences for him and his family, culminating in Gregor’s death. Yet the most significant change is, in fact, the gender role reversal seen both with Gregor and Grete, his sister, as Gregor becomes more effeminate and Grete becomes more emasculate, directly correlating with their societal and emotional transformation due to Gregor's physical change. From the moment, Gregor wakes up he has transformed. But not just as a vermin.
Furthermore, in Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, Tereus, the king of Thracian, rapes his wife’s sister; he takes her into the woods. Philomela then threatens to tell the world that a noble king has raped her, and for that reason, Tereus decides to cut Philomela’s tongue off, rapes her again, as well as imprisons her in a cabin in the woods. Nonetheless, unable to speak, Philomela is forced to send a tapestry to her sister to reveal the Tereus’s crime. Philomela’s sister, Procne discovers that her husband is a rapist. Philomela and Procne decide to seek revenge, and they do so by killing Itys, Procne, and King Tereus’s son.
Two men from different time zones and religions are surprising similar. One is a hero from Greek myth who had to go on a harrowing journey to return to his home. The other, a simple man from Norse mythology who was just too arogant for his own good. Odysseus and Mundilfari. Different in some ways, but very similar in others.
In a family there are many different roles; there's the role of the mother, the father, the child, the grandparents, then there’s the brothers and sisters. Every single one of those roles has different responsibilities. The father, according to most of society, is supposed to be the breadwinner for the family. However, nowadays the mother is actually quite capable of being the breadwinner just as much of as the father. As they work to show their children what it is to be an adult they are teaching them as well on how to be an active member of society.
In Euripides’s The Bacchae and in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, I found the gender roles in these particular plays to be very interesting because this was my first exposure to cross-dressing in works of literature. In The Bacchae, women play a huge role because women are often portrayed as feminine and inferior in many past works, however, in The Bacchae, the women of Thebes decide to rebel against the men and join the Greek God of grape harvesting, wine, fertility, and partying, in the woods. The women were manipulated by Dionysus and were turned into maenads because they joined Dionysus and rejected the norms for women, to stay in their place and they all went from the first world they were living in, Thebes, to the second world,
Ancient Greek sexuality and gender roles and their place in society were very different from what is considered the societal norm today. Society, law and democracy focused on the adult male citizen [Source 9], with mainstream sexuality being defined as his active pursuit of a partner of lower social status than himself who was expected to be passive in both the courtship and the sex act itself [Source 2][Source 6][Source 10]. This partner could be a woman, an adolescent boy, or slaves of either gender. It should probably be pointed out at this point that, while much has been written on “Greek homosexuality,” the Ancient Greeks themselves would not have seen it as such, as such definitions only really came into usage relatively recently [Source 4]. The Ancient Greeks had no concept of “gay” as we would understand it, as equally no concept of “straight.”
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the roles of women are all over the place and pretty extreme. It ranges from girls like Daphne running away from Apollo who lusts over her to malevolent women such as Juno. Ovid portrays both women who are lustful and then some women who are strong and unforgiving. Even though there are some people who may portray this story negatively due to it’s sadistic ways, Ovid portrayed the way women were during that era while Homer portrayed the women he wrote about to have unorthodox roles and
Mythology is consistently composed of stories that serve to explain the inexplicable in an attempt to make sense of the world in which we live. The Tales of Ovid in particular illustrates several crucial, reoccurring, themes within Greek literature: the most important being rape. Repeatedly, the tampering of the immortal gods often leads to the destruction of downfall of humanity, but specifically the gods play a crucial role in the unwilling defilement of women within the story. In this manner, deception achieves the desired trust, then the woman is raped resulting in the loss of her innocence, until finally she is severely ridiculed and punished in an unfair manner, often by other women, leaving her voiceless. Ted Hughes shows the first
