Divine Intervention in the Odyssey

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Throughout the whole world, people have created religions with gods who can influence one’s life. The Ancient Greeks believed in many deities such as Zeus, Poseidon, Hades and Athena and they all had a specific purpose. In the Odyssey, Homer used these gods to influence Odysseus’ journey home and his life after returning home. As presented in the story, the gods ultimately determine a mortal’s life and leave him with little freedom to exercise his own will as a result of events outside one’s control. This is shown through the gods hindering his journey, prophecies and omens, and support from the gods.
The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s journey home to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War. This voyage took nearly 20 years because of the many places Odysseus went to and the trouble he experienced at sea. A large part of the many circumstances that lengthened Odysseus’s journey were caused by the gods. Whether it was Poseidon, Calypso, Circe, Zeus or Athena; a divine creature controlled Odysseus’s journey. Zeus sent Odysseus and his men “hard fate” and “laid sorrows upon” (106). Odysseus’s will was to get home to his family however; these sorrows and the fate from the gods controlled his will and left him little power with what he wanted to do. After Odysseus encountered the Ciconians, men from the island attacked his ship and this slowed his return home. They fought from dawn until “the sun began to change course” (106). This fight caused by Zeus is like when one is trying desperately to leave somewhere to go home but the person he is visiting keeps asking questions or starting new conversations. Every minute the person spends talking; he gets home one minute later. This is similar to Odysseus because he wanted to get home...

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...th she became worshipped as a goddess. She lived in the sea but was not goddess of the sea. When Odysseus left Calypso’s island, Poseidon sent a great storm and he was separated from his raft. Ino saw that Odysseus was in trouble and said, “take this veil… for it is a divine thing… you will come to no harm” (70). This determined Odysseus’s life because without the divine veil he would have drowned or be eaten by a creature of the sea. The divine creature once again determined the life of a mortal because she saved him from death and did not let Odysseus solve the problem himself.
In the Odyssey, mortals’ fates are formed and changed by the divine deities as it can help or hurt the human. The gods were constantly influencing Odysseus’s fate and his own will deteriorated. In today’s society our religions tell what the gods do and sometimes they influence one’s fate.

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