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The Role Of The Gods In Homer's The Odyssey

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Science today is way more advanced than back in 650 B.C.E. and we have tools and scientists that explain the natural phenomena that we still deal with today. The Greeks however had a very different way of explaining these natural phenomena. The Greeks used Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, and their gods to explain these phenomena for them. Yan covers these phenomena like Earthquakes which were previously thought to had been caused by the sea god, Poseidon, or that storms were caused by Zeus and that the Sun came up everyday thanks to Helios. Which today are now proved through orbit of the Earth and low and high air pressure. Even though we both had our own way of explaining these phenomena, they varied drastically. While Odysseus was traveling with his men on his ship they and alone on his raft he stumbled along unexplainable storms that battered his ship and his crew which were thought …show more content…

While Odysseus and his men were leaving the island of Thrinacia they were hit by a thunderstorm. “the son of Saturn [Zeus] raised a black cloud over our ship, and the sea grew dark beneath it.” (Homer). Zeus struck down upon Odysseus’ ship because they had disrespected Helios by consuming a couple of his sacred cows which didn’t make him happy. Helios reported them to Zeus demanding that they be punished for their actions and Zeus complied by killing everyone but Odysseus. People today look for solid evidence to explain their wonderings about natural phenomena “Those with a magnitude higher than 7.0 -- more than doubled in the first quarter of 2014 compared with the average since 1979” (Yan 2). This shows how we rely on evidence to explain what is happening to the planet. Whereas the Greeks in 700 B.C.E. looked towards religion to find a

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