hey this should be a pretty quick video on themes in the odyssey um you know homer when he wrote the odyssey clearly had some things on his mind that come out time and time again over the course of of the story so i just want to go through those um in no particular order i guess maybe the order of how the most prominent the least prominent maybe i guess um so the first theme that we're going to look at in the odyssey is an age-old theme it's civilization versus nature this is one of those themes that you run into in in stories all the time but it's much more prominent in stories that come from oral tradition and stories that go back to old cultures this is because back in the old days it was much more of a struggle to survive in the world than it is now and so nature nowadays we tend to think of nature as um this great glorious perfect thing that is is designed to be in a symbiotic relationship with us we're supposed to be working together with nature and somehow we've gotten out of balance with nature and so nature's sort of the good guy and civilization is sort of the bad guy and we're to blame for destroying nature that's a narrative that comes across in today's stories in today's societies but back in ancient times nature was an antagonist nature was was evil and it was destroying civilization people were often barely hanging on now in the mediterranean this is not quite as pronounced as if you were reading say an anglo-saxon epic written you know in a northern climate where there are icebergs floating around and it's much harder to grow a harvest and to survive and things like that but uh it's still a very present and important theme in greek mythology you can see this in the story itself odessius and his crew are on a ship and they're trying to get home across the ocean the primary antagonist to odessius in the story is actually the god of the sea poseidon and so on some very fundamental level there's a story about civilization symbolized by odessius who's the king of ithaca um and his crew and their opposition to or the way they're being opposed by the ocean itself and so it's a struggle of civilization against the ocean something that's untameable something that's um unfathomably large and hard to understand and so civilization versus nature underpins a lot of what's going on in the story and you can look at the various monsters that odessius faces as representations of nature and this struggle um both odysseus learning to respect nature and and realize that it's more powerful than than himself slash civilization um but also to try and out think the the um skill that odesius uses to um overcome his struggles with nature is his mind and that too represents civilization the power of human beings to think and to outwit so we'll track that as we go through and look at look at the ways that his the monsters that he faces the the dangers that he has to overcome represent nature number two the importance of family odysseus is on a quest to return home to his wife and son his wife is named penelope his son is named telemachus and when he left his son was a baby just a tiny baby in fact there's a story about odessius leaving for the trojan war he didn't want to go yeah he had made a promise like it goes back to helen apparently when when helen was trying to find a husband there were all of these suitors and one of the suitors for for helen was odessius before he met his wife penelope he was interested in marrying helen and she ended up deciding to marry menelaus but part of part of the story is that all of her suitors made a vow to come to mennelius's aid if ever he needed it because he won her hand and they were in love with her and it was sort of a prophetic sort of thing because they all do have to come to his aid when she gets kidnapped by paris uh but odesi has wanted to go back on this vow um he had a wife and kid of his own he thought it would be dangerous to go to um troy and he tried to avoid it entirely and menelaus knew how tricky and intelligent odysseus was so the guy he sent to bring odesius to war was also a tricky and intelligent guy uh his name was palamides and when uh palomini's arrived to bring odesius to the trojan war odessius was pretending to be insane he was acting crazy he was putting salt on his fields and he hitched up a donkey and an oxen to his plow at the same time and they were going at different speeds and you know he was plowing in a completely ludicrous way and doing all these things to convince palomidis that he had lost his mind and thereby was you know essentially 4f was was not fit to go to war but palamides uh took his young baby son his infant son telemachus and he put um odessa's son telemachus uh directly in front of the plow and if odysseus didn't turn the plow he would have run over and killed his own son and odessa has turned the plow out of the way there by proving his sanity and then he had to go off to war uh and he left and he was gone for 10 years at the trojan war and then he's going to take 10 years coming home because he's delayed by poseidon and the various problems and so 20 years go by this baby who was an infant when he left is going to be a 20 year old young man when he comes home and his wife penelope uh has never lost faith in odessius's ultimate return she she prays to the gods every day for his return but the problem is that it's been 20 years and so all of these suitors have entered the house suitors are um you know people who want to marry her because she's a queen of ithaca if they marry her um whoever marries her gets to be king of ithaca and uh have all of the properties and all of the wealth of odessius and so they all assume he's dead he's been m.i.a for 20 years and um so part of the importance of family theme is is the struggle of odessius to get home and all that he's willing to go through to get home to his wife penelope part of it is her devotion to him she comes up with a stratagem she comes up with a ruse to not have to marry any of these suitors she says that she's making a funeral um i guess paul or cloak or i don't know what you want to call blanket for laertes odesi is his father he's not dead yet but she's planning it for his funeral he's an old man and she says when she's done making that then she will marry and um she makes it every day on her loom and every night she unwinds it so that she gets to keep working on it and and through the strategy which kind of i think um is it well anyway uh through this strategy she she ends up um delaying the suitors for a good long time but right before the odyssey starts the suitors have discovered what she's doing done and is are now sort of forcing her to try and choose one of them and marry one of them so she's doing her best not to marry somebody while she's married to odessius thereby ensuring the sanctity of the family meanwhile the son telemachus is determined to go and find his father uh and and thereby reunite the family and so all three of the family characters here are striving to reunite the family and that's a key and important theme in the story uh next we have the importance of hospitality this gets stressed in sort of both legs of the story the story is actually going to take two parts there's the ithaca part and then there's the odysseus off in the mediterranean part and so we're going to keep shifting between these two parts and um odessius is going to put himself in a lot of encounters where sometimes he's treated hospitally hospitab hospitably yeah there we go by the people that um he encounters and sometimes he is not and so the author is going to give you this contrast we call it a juxtaposition in english it's a fancy word for a compare and contrast between people who treat him well like the faitians and people who treat him badly like the cyclops and you're going to get this give and take between the two of them and by watching um how people treat a stranger how people treat a guest you as a reader a greek reader theoretically thousands of years ago start to learn the importance of hospitality and how to treat others and uh that's that's how the thing works meanwhile in the other side of the story which takes place in ithaca odesses homeland and involves penelope and telemachus and telemachus going off on a journey to find his father we get a similar situation we have these suitors who are all living in odessius's house eating his food treating everyone with disrespect treating them badly treating penelope and telemachus badly they're they're taking advantage of audacious hospitality and not giving any in return and so you've got these suitors who show um sort of a negative aspect of hospitality but then you have telemachus who's going to go off on his journey and on his journey looking for his father he's going to stay with nestor um in pilos and you're going to see positive hospitality he's going to go to sparta and visit menelaus you're going to see positive hospitality and so you get again sort of give and take that shows you as a reader how to act and how to behave so the importance of hospitality is definitely an important theme in the story next we have respect the gods odesius is in this problem because he didn't respect the gods especially the god of the sea as much as he should and that's a difficulty he's learning and he's growing and he's able to to gain respect for the gods as the story goes on uh telemachus is going to be involved with athena and treat her with respect in very strong ways it's not just respect the gods also disrespect your elders um i think there's there's a number of sort of like little respect lessons within the story itself but the suitors very clearly do not respect the gods um they are mistreating everybody around them and they become an example of the dangers of arrogance and pride which is a related theme but odesius uh his disrespect to poseidon and his arrogance put him in trouble and the suitors their disrespect for zeus and for the rules of hospitality put them in trouble and so these two themes are interrelated though they're they're also very easy to separate um number five is the dangers of arrogance and pride hubris right we talked about hubris that overweening um enormous pride that the epic heroes especially in ancient greek literature tend to have which ultimately causes them difficulties and sometimes like achilles uh results in the death or downfall of people they love and so odesius is off on this long 10-year journey because he has been so arrogant that he's invoked the wrath of poseidon and you know he's on a boat at sea you don't piss off the god of the sea when you have a sea journey to make and so odysseus has to learn to overcome his pride and swallow his pride you're going to see that very very strongly towards the end of the story i'm not going to reveal how or why but watch odesius and his pride sort of change as the story goes on the suitors too like i said are disrespecting the gods but they never change they continue to be arrogant we all know what happens to arrogant people icarus or arachne or or what have you over the course of of stories finally and this theme really only applies to telemachus himself uh this is a coming-of-age story telemachus is becoming a man he's transitioning from the role of a child to a greek warrior citizen you know what have you and so we have a sort of a passing of the torch story we're going to at the end of the story um see laertes odesis father the grandfather the father and the son all sort of united together in an interesting way and it shows this progression it connects back to the importance of family but the coming of age story is something that is age old and and if you're reading your outside reading book i think all of them are coming of age stories even though bilbo baggins is 50 when the story begins he's still a child in a lot of ways and he grows and changes and matures and so when you watch that central figure in this case telemachus go through the progression and begin to accept the responsibilities and make decisions that really matter in life and see and judge the outcome of those decisions and and become his own person that's what we call a coming of age story and almost all um young adult literature nowadays is coming-of-age stories that's that's the big central and this is this is one of those stories um as well so that's i think enough themes to go on uh you can write this list down they make good themes for your literary analysis paragraphs as you go to write those in the fourth quarter but again don't just use the theme as a buzzword don't be like and this stresses the importance of the theme the importance of family i mean okay but really one thing that i've been trying to teach you all year as you go through and you work on your writing is you have to phrase the theme as a lesson from the author to the reader so instead of when you go to write about this saying the theme is the importance of family what is homer trying to teach the reader and the way to say that would be something like homer is trying to teach the reader that when it all comes down to it the most important thing that anybody can have in their life is family it's more important than fame it's more important than wealth um it's more important than your pride right and and you want to get that sort of an idea across in your assertions rather than be like the importance of family all right i'm gonna shut up now and uh hopefully this this video is useful to you any of you have any questions now's the time to ask i'm more than happy to answer them thanks