Odysseus

Paper Summary:

"The Metamorphoses" by Homer portrays a different side of Odysseus as a character, which is entirely different from the Odysseus that readers were acquainted to in "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" by Homer. While Odysseus is portrayed as a courageous and intelligent warrior in "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," Ajax in "The Metamorphoses" is illustrated as a coward and a brilliant schemer in order to fool the people in believing that he is the rightful heir to the title of Achilles as the great warrior of the Achaean/Greek society. This main difference between Ovid and Homer's works is the focus of this paper.

From the Paper:

"Ovid, on the other hand, portrays a different and more critical picture of Ulysses (Odysseus) as warrior in the Roman literature. In an article by James Hunter, Odysseus' character is similar to Ovid's portrayal in "The Metamorphoses," wherein he is known to be a cunning and treacherous warrior who would rather find ways out of a problematic situation than to fight bravely towards solving the problem (Hunter 2003). In fact, in W. B. Stanford's analysis of Odysseus character in the "The Ulysses Theme," he discusses the criticism of Ovid and other Roman literary writers in the portrayal of Odysseus in the "post-classical tradition." "

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