Odysseus And Achilles Comparison Essay

Authors have different tastes and styles when it comes to creating characters. Generally, most of the characters they make follow the same cut out. Meaning that if their first main character is silent and moody while being good, the next main character they write will be similar to the first. That is unless they are Homer from ancient times. Homer pulls out all the stops when creating his characters Achilles and Odysseus. “Swift-footed, lionhearted, terrible in his war cry, a sacker of cities...a stunning physical specimen, unconquerable--except by an arrow to his heel--Achilles was the best of the Greeks at Troy.” (Strauss) An example of how people saw Achilles as a man. From the example above and the argument to follow, there is a great deal of information to mull over to account for Achilles from The Iliad, and Odysseus from The Odyssey similarities and differences. A major difference in the the two character Achilles and Odysseus from The Iliad and The Odyssey is their approach towards conflict. As stated above, Achilles was, “a sacker of citites,” meaning that Achilles liked to use his physical strength to force another person, city or race into submission. During the Battle of Troy, the Trojans were winning until Achilles decided to join the fight again. This shifted the entire tide of the war into …show more content…
Achilles and Odysseus even share a tribulation which was the destruction of Troy. “Some six hundred years later a critic whose writings have come down under the name Longinus claimed that the Iliad was the poem of Homer's youth and the Odyssey of his old age.” (Beye) The crazy thought is that after The Iliad was written, it took some time much later till the tale of Odysseus was finally written. This is because Odysseus was a hero that no one wanted to touch on, especially how his life would