Odysseus Essay, Research Paper

What do many people feel they lack in life? When I am asked this question, many thoughts are elicited and kindled to a point where I cannot decide. But, through the harsh proclivities of nature the many things we feel we lack in life are very lucid, such as adventure, gratification, friendships, love, and wisdom. If a person can claim that he has not lacked any of these, he would have to be Odysseus, from Homer’s, ”The Odyssey.’ Although fictitious, Odysseus’s character has served as model for everything I strive to be, and has been a significant influence in my life.

If I could be one person for a day it would be Odysseus. He could very well be one of the only people in the world to be able to claim that he had adventure, gratification, friendship, wisdom, and love. Odysseus was in a grave predicament because he did not know if he would ever be able to see his family or kingdom again, yet he placed all his faith in the hands of the god’s. To have as much faith as he did would make me spiritually immortal. I would be enthralled to be the leader and dependant of such a perilous journey, knowing that the members on my crew would depend on my wisdom and keen perception to deliver them back home, which in Odysseus’ case was Ithicag. To be a leader is a quality, which I truly admire and hope to acquire. There is not a statement in the world that can truly capture Odysseus’ wisdom in its entirety: a statement can never deliver his wisdom due just. To have his wisdom in today’s modern world would most definitely make me a paragon in comparison to modern society. For example, the way in which he deceived the Cyclops, son of Poseidon, in to believing that his name was, ‘No One,” so he could escape furtively, was ingenious yet when thought of carefully, so simple. That is

who he was, a simple yet shrewd and vigorous person. It would overwhelm me to be thought of as one who has a firm grasp of all these qualities.

Odysseus was gratified by the people of Ithica, and of the whole of Greece, as a person whose qualities were in parity to no other. Odysseus’ shipmates, although, are the ones who loved him the most, because he is the one who delivered them their salvation from death. It would be the greatest thing in the world for me to know that I was loved and classified as a person of such excellence by an entire crew, let alone an entire country. Odysseus also held the love of his wife Penelope. I could not dare say that any woman would have the strength to wait for even a couple years for the return of her lost husband, yet Penelope waited almost twenty years. To know that I held the love of such a woman as great as Penelope, who would keep me in her heart for twenty years, not knowing if I was alive, would mean more than the world to me. No one in this world can claim that they have such a powerful love as this. To top it all off, Odysseus lived in my favorite part of the world, Greece, to have lived in such a wonderful period as he had would be perfection.