The Elements Of Nature And Culture In Homer's Odyssey

While many would argue that the human species officially embarked on the journey to “conquer” nature at the inception of the Industrial Revolution, with men bending nature to suit their purposes on an unprecedented scale, the seeds of such sentiments to surpass nature with created culture had been planted hundreds of thousands of years ago. With a casual overview of human history, one can see that the idea of bending elements of nature to human will rose as early as hundreds of thousands of years ago, perhaps when homo erectus first started cooking food with fire. The idea of the cultural death, the burning of one’s body to prevent one from being consumed by the elements of nature that occupies a most illustrious position in the Homeric world, can be dated back to roughly 20,000 years ago (Lake Mungo remains), the currently earliest recorded act of cremating the dead. Homer frequently juxtaposes aspects of nature and culture in his work. In the Odyssey, Homer juxtaposes the society of Cyclops with the civilized human society, demonstrating the stark differences between a naturalistic and a cultural society. Homer, by presenting multiple heroes in aristéia, demonstrates nature as both inferior and superior to culture, with the

Through Patroclus, Homer presents to the readers how each individual in the Homeric world would perceive oneself being denied proper funeral rituals. He also presents the perceived importance of proper funeral rituals in the eyes of the Homeric society at large, as at the conclusion of the duel between the great Aiax and the Hector in Book VII, Nestor, whose “plans and tactics always seemed the best” (Iliad 7.373), makes the following suggestion to stop all battle on the next day to pay proper respect to their