Odysseus As A Hero In Homer's Odyssey

A hero is an individual that demonstrates behaviours and decisions that are ethically and emotionally worthy of awe. They are individuals that do extraordinary things and give their lives to something bigger than themselves. As a society, a hero is a champion, warrior, advocate, defender and a friend. The existence of heroes has dated back to early ancient civilizations, but has been most prominent in Ancient Greece, where Trojan War and Olympian heroes were just as important to society as the Gods. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian epic poem opens with the line, “he who gazed into the deep, the unknown, the abyss” to express what a hero must endure on a heroic quest. Heroic quests consist of confrontation of the unknown, falling into

Humans like to understand that they are getting themselves into and what they can expect, but when entering the unknown, everything is mysterious and undetermined. As a hero, Odysseus experienced the unknown the moment he set on his quest back home to Ithaca from the war. Odysseus was hurtled into the exploration of the great unknown for a decade, in which he encountered a witch-goddess, a Cyclops, monsters, sirens, shipwrecks, Gods, and exotic lands that were all new to him. He had many episodes of arriving on strange shores and meeting unknown cultures and characters, which may have or have not presented him with xenia. Many of these unidentified, unseen places were enclosed with walls of great beauty that created an atmosphere of different universes shore to shore. Each experience he had on his voyage was different and contained many things that he could have only imagined or heard about in his youth. Once the Phaecians drop him off in Ithaca, as he was unable to recognize his own country. At that moment he understood that the youth of Ithaca and himself was gone and that nothing was like the way it was when he left; he accepted that even his homeland was the unknown. During his heroic quest, Odysseus did not only experience a journey outward to a physical unknown but inward as well to a psychological unknown. Odysseus changed in the course of his trip as he became wiser, self-controlled and humble. The hero must face the unknown in order to grow as a champion and experience the threshold of