Heroes In Homer's Odyssey

Heroes have always been an influential concept of humanity regardless of culture, religion, and age. The Odyssey, by Homer, is an epic poem that follows the journey of Odysseus as he attempts to get back home to Ithaca, where his son, Telemachus, and wife, Penelope, are waiting for him in a palace beset with suitors. In The Odyssey, Odysseus utilises his intelligence and wit in order to come back home from the Trojan War. BTS’s Min Yoongi, or Agust D, is a rapper who persistently and relentlessly worked hard in order to achieve his dream of becoming a musician. The analysis of Odysseus and Yoongi suggests that humanity needs heroes from across the ages in order to emphasize the struggles and the ideal characteristics of society.

As a hero

In Ancient Greece, The Odyssey took place after the Trojan War, which had caused most men to leave home in order to fight against the Trojans. After the war, the “crews keen(ed) for home, but a quick return was not in Zeus’s plans” (III, 176). And like the men he led, Odysseus yearned to be home. When he was stranded on Calypso’s island, “he’d sleep with her in the arching cave...but all his days he’d sit on the rocks and beaches, wrenching his heart with sobs and groans and anguish, gazing out over the barren sea...” (V, 170-175). Despite being on a beautiful island with a goddess, the seas he looked over every day were “barren” alluding to how Odysseus’s situation felt hollow and empty in comparison to his home and family waiting back in Ithaca. This event shows how Odysseus was the embodiment of all men who fought in the war and their desire to go home. And when Odysseus reached home, “he wept as he held the wife he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last. Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel when they catch sight of land…” (XXIII, 260-263). This moment in the novel is critical, as it showed that the struggle many men of Ancient Greece faced could be solved, and end well. In modern day society, there is a stigmatism around the idea of pursuing a career other than jobs considered ‘successful’ or ‘high levelled’. In Tomorrow, a song composed by Yoongi for his band, he wrote “follow your dreams like a breaker, even if it breaks down, oh better” (Tomorrow, BTS). Yoongi encouraged the idea of following a dream, and by saying “even if it breaks down”, he is telling listeners to not stop following those dreams as he knew that many young adults struggled with deciding whether or not to do so. When Yoongi released his mixtape under the name ‘Agust D’, he released a personal song called The Last. In The Last, he stated that “the