noun
definition
An extended adventurous voyage.
definition
An intellectual or spiritual quest.
Examples of odyssey in a Sentence
I think I shall enjoy the "Odyssey" most of all.
In the Odyssey we already find the Crete.
In 182 2 he was sent to the Kreuzschule at Dresden, where he did so well that, four years later, he translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey for amusement.
We learn from Suetonius that, like Ennius after him, he obtained his living by teaching Greek and Latin; and it was probably as a school-book, rather than as a work of literary pretension, that his translation of the Odyssey into Latin Saturnian verse was executed.
The epic of Gudrun is not unworthy to stand beside the greater Nibelungenlied, and it has been aptly compared with it as the Odyssey to the Iliad.
In the Odyssey it is said that the gods disclosed the impiety.
The philological analysis of Wolf and his successors had raised doubts as to the very existence of Homer, and at one time the main current of scholarly opinion had set strongly in the direction of the belief that the Iliad and the Odyssey were in reality but latter-day collections of divers recitals that had been handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another of bards through ages of illiteracy.
Tonight he takes us on an entertaining northern odyssey, illustrated with some stunning photography.
He translated the Odyssey, wrote a wellknown manual of idiom, A Plea for the Queen's English (1863), and was the first editor of the Contemporary Review (1866-1870).
It seems, then, that if we imagine Homer as a singer in a royal house of the Homeric age, but with more freedom regarding the limits of his subject, and a more tranquil audience than is allowed him in the rapid movement of the Odyssey, we shall probably not be far from the truth.
Added to the group were various newcomers, ignorant until now of the young girl's recent odyssey.
Among the other prominent buildings in Weimar are the Griines Schloss (18th century), containing a library of 200,000 volumes and a valuable collection of portraits, busts and literary and other curiosities; the old ducal dower-house (Wittumspalais); the museum, built in1863-1868in the Renaissance style with some old masters and Preller's famous mural paintings illustrating the Odyssey.
In the Odyssey, however, he appears mainly as the messenger of the gods, and the conductor of the dead to Hades.
In later accounts (and even in the Odyssey) Ares' character is somewhat toned down; thus, in the "Homeric" hymn to Ares, he is addressed as the assistant of Themis (Justice), the enemy of tyrants, and leader of the just.
Zenodotus produced before 274 the first scientific edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, an edition in which spurious lines were marked, at the beginning, with a short horizontal dash called an obelus (-).
The greatest philologist of antiquity was, however, his successor, Aristophanes of Byzantium (195), who reduced accentuation and punctuation to a definite system, and used a variety of critical symbols in his recension of the Iliad and Odyssey.
The opening pages of his commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey dwell with enthusiasm on the abiding influence of Homer on the literature of Greece.
Schulze's period of prominence in Berlin closely corresponded to that of Herbart at Konigsberg (1809-1833) and Göttingen (1833-1841), who insisted that for boys of eight to twelve there was no better text-book than the Greek Odyssey, and this principle was brought into practice at Hanover by his distinguished pupil, Ahrens.
The fact is that no amount of ingenuity can reconcile the descriptions given in the Odyssey with the actual topography of this island.
The stratagems and disguises by which with the help of a few faithful friends he slew the suitors are described at length in the Odyssey.
Berard, Les Phe'niciens et l'Odyssee (1902-1903), who regards the Odyssey as "the integration in a Greek voo-Tos (home-coming) of a Semitic periplus," in the form of a poem written 900-850 B.C. by an Ionic poet at the court of one of the Neleid kings of Miletus.
Both were afterwards worshipped as marine divinities, Ino as Leucothea, Melicertes as Palaemon (Odyssey 333).
Livius Andronicus, laid the foundation of a new Latin literature by his translation of the Odyssey, and that the Greek dramas were recast in a Latin mould.
The obsequies of Achilles, as described in the Odyssey, were also celebrated with details which are strikingly similar to those observed in tumuli both of the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Beowulf's own burial is minutely described in terms which have a strong resemblance to the parallel passages in the Iliad and Odyssey.
Hestia was closely connected with Zeus, the god of the family both in its external relation of hospitality and its internal unity round its own hearth; in the Odyssey a form of oath is by Zeus, the table and the hearth.
It is spoken of in the Iliad as the stormy abode of Selli who sleep on the ground and wash not their feet, and in the Odyssey an imaginary visit of Odysseus to the oracle is referred to.
Odysseus, warned by Circe, escaped the danger by stopping the ears of his crew with wax and binding himself to the mast until he was out of hearing (Odyssey xii.).
The New English Dictionary points out that the transferred use is due less to Homer's Odyssey than to Fenelon's Telemaque, in which Mentor is a somewhat prominent character.
Many of the works once attributed to him are lost; those which remain are the two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, thirty-three Hymns, a mock epic (the Battle of the Frogs and Mice), and some pieces of a few lines each (the so-called Epigrams).
The Odyssey gives us pictures of two great houses, and each has its singer.
It may be granted that the author of the Odyssey can hardly have been just such a singer as he himself describes.
Nor is it necessary to suppose that epic poetry, at the time to which the picture in the Odyssey belongs, was confined to the one type represented.
The subdivision of a poem like the Iliad or Odyssey among different and necessarily unequal performers must have been injurious to the effect.
That it was the mode of recitation contemplated by the author of the Iliad or Odyssey it is impossible to believe.
The further question, whether the Iliad and Odyssey were originally written, is much more difficult.
Arguments have been founded upon the descriptions of the blind singers in the Odyssey, with their songs inspired directly by the Muse; upon the appeals of the poet to the Muses, especially in such a place as the opening of the Catalogue; upon the Catalogue itself, which is a kind of historical document put into verse to help the memory; upon the shipowner in the Odyssey, who has " a good memory for his cargo," &c. It may be answered, however, that much of this is traditional, handed down from the time when all poetry was unwritten.
The result of these various considerations seems to be that the age which we may call the Homeric - the age which is brought before us in vivid outlines in the Iliad and Odyssey - lies beyond the earliest point to which history enables us to penetrate.
The use of that dialect (instead of Aeolic) by the Boeotian poet Hesiod, in a kind of poetry which was not of the Homeric type, tends to the conclusion that the literary ascendancy of the epic dialect was anterior to the Iliad and Odyssey, and independent of the influence exercised by these poems.
The later poets sought to complete the story of the Trojan war by supplying the parts which did not fall within the Iliad and Odyssey - the so-called ante-homerica and post-homerica.
Thus the successive episodes of the siege related at length in the Little Iliad, and ending with the story of the Wooden Horse, are nearly all taken from passages in the Odyssey.
Monro's Homer's Odyssey, books xiii.
These facts point to a familiarity with the Greek colonies in Asia which contrasts strongly with the silence of the Iliad and Odyssey.
This conclusion he then supports by the character attributed to the " Cyclic " poems (whose want of unity showed that the structure of the Iliad and Odyssey must be the work of a later time), by one or two indications of imperfect connexion, and by the doubts of ancient critics as to the genuineness of certain parts.
Wolf had argued that if the cyclic writers had known the Iliad and Odyssey which we possess, they would have imitated the unity of structure which distinguishes these two poems. The result of Welcker's labours was to show that the Homeric poems had influenced both the form and the substance of epic poetry.
In this way there arose a conservative school who admitted more or less freely the absorption of pre-existing lays in the formation of the Iliad and Odyssey, and also the existence of considerable interpolations, but assigned the main work of formation to prehistoric times, and to the genius of a great poet.
The difficulty of adapting the long wanderings of Ulysses to a plan of this type is got over by the device - first met with in the Odyssey - of making the hero tell the story of his own adventures.
Kirchhoff of Berlin.2 According to Kirchhoff, the Odyssey as we have it is the result of additions made to an original nucleus.
The passages in the second half of the Odyssey which describe the appearance of Ulysses do not give two wellmarked representations of him.
Kirchhoff argues that the Artacia of the Argonautic story must have been taken from the real Artacia, and the Artacia of the Odyssey again from that of the Argonautic story.