Odysseus Greatest Enemy Essay

Odysseus’s Greatest Enemy: The World Itself Greece is a beautiful Mediterranean-bordering country. People revel in its beautiful mountains and beaches. One would think that nothing bad could ever occur in such a beautiful paradise. However, in the grand epic The Odyssey, written by the Greek poet Homer, a gentleman named Odysseus is put into troubling scenarios which he must surpass in order to be reunited with his love, Penelope. As “People need heroes and epics provide heroes who fight against injustice and immorality” (Baker, 9), Odysseus had to spend years of his lifetime “Fighting monsters, avoiding the Sirens, consulting the dead and even falling into the lily-white arms of Calypso” (Lacarriére, par. 17). Another identifiable potent force in the epic is the aquatic and terrestrial features of Greece and his home, Ithaca. Although the geography of Greece is currently known for its beauty and tranquility,
Due to the fact that “The Greek coast is rugged and its mountains continue to plunge beneath the water line, making the drop-off too steep to allow for the sinking of pilings in Homer’s time” (Halkin, par. 2), it made landing all the more difficult, as the amount of decent landing points were limited. Another component as to why the islands were difficult to land upon is the fact that “There are more than 1,360 Greek islands” (Lacarriére, par. 1). The fact that there were so many islands overly grouped together in one general area made it so that much more of the Mediterranean was taken up by the shores and rocks belonging to these islands. These conditions harden the burden of sailing and steering ships around the sea. With these circumstances, it is easy to conclude that the beaches and shores of these islands were a major threat to Odysseus’s