Opposites Dont Always Attract

Homer’s Odyssey is one of the Greek epic poems that show extreme differences in foreigners. During Odysseus’ travels he encounters many different peoples like the Cyclopes, Lotus Eaters, Laestrygonians, Phaiakians, and even minor gods and monsters. When we first see these peoples through the eyes of Odysseus, they are shown to be extremely d

ifferent from the true Greeks, like Odysseus himself. Some are “hyper” good and some are evil. Homer manipulates these differences to make the reader believe these foreigners are really the exact opposite of true Greeks and even makes these differences incredibly extreme to show how civilized the Greeks are compared to them. Even though he makes some of the foreigners that Odysseus meets seem to be kind and good, they too have their imperfections, like Calypso is an adulteress and the Phaiakians are too civilized, and when he compares these seemingly good peoples to the “perfect” Odysseus he even puts the good foreigners in a bad light. Also when Homer does make Odysseus encounter truly evil creatures he adds to their evilness by giving them traits that are morally repugnant to the Greek people to illicit a response from them, like the overly blasphemous Polyphemos. “The Cyclops do not concern themselves over Zeus of the aegis, nor any of the rest of the blessed gods, since we are far better that they… ” Finally, when Homer does allow the Greeks to have any imperfections, their vices seem rather tiny in comparison to the evils the foreigners perpetrate.

Even the word barbarian, which come from the Greek word for foreigner, shows that the Greeks classified the people the encountered by their differences because the word sounds like the babble of a foreign language. Although its hard to determine the true grasp of the writings of the Greek poets, play writes, and historians one thing is clear, they believed all t

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