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Prayer In Confessions Analysis

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Prayers to Those Above: From Homer to Augustine To request a favor from a higher deity, people across time and location learn to pray and sacrifice to give back to the gods for hearing the pleas. Although years separate them, one can see that Greco-Roman authors often follow the same rules of praying to a god. However, even after the time of Ancient Greece and Rome can readers still find the invocation of gods with barely anything changed from the time before. Constantine's performance of prayer in Confessions is a sudden change from the those in the texts such as Homer's Iliad and Sappho's fragments students have read in the Literature Humanities course. With a sudden shift from a polytheistic Greco-Roman time to a monotheistic period, it is not …show more content…

Within one of her poems. Sappho calls upon "Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, child of Zeus, who twists lures" (Sappho 3) to assist her with her love life. Sappho's invocation is rather brief compared to Constantine's continuous praise of God. With short descriptions of Aphrodite being the "O blessed one" or having a "deathless face" (Sappho 3), Sappho's respect to Aphrodite is mentioned through her portrayal of the goddess' past deeds for her. Constantine is out right with his praise, stating that God is "most high above things" (Constantine 31) or how God "will lighten [his] darkness" (Constantine 68). He also repeatedly calls the deity "Lord my God" throughout the book, contrasting with Sappho's one mention of Aphrodite's name in the beginning of her poem. God's repeated title serves as a way to ground Constantine and remind himself that his audience of the novel is God first then the mortal readers. On the other hand, Sappho's prayer switches her point of view, sometimes even putting Aphrodite herself as the speaker in the

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“Father Zeus, doesn’t it infuriate you to see this violence? We gods get the worst of it from each other whenever we try to help out men. Why did you have to give birth to that madwoman, your marauding daughter who is always breaking the rules? All the rest of us gods, everyone on Olympus, listens to you. But she can say or do whatever she wants.”

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Rhetorical Analysis "Fear is an instructor of great sagacity and the herald of all resolutions. "- Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was a sermon written and delivered by American reverend Jonathan Edwards in 1741, and was an outstanding example of the potentially dominant convincing powers of the use of Rhetoric. The sermon, even when read silently, is effective in projecting a specific interpretation of the wrathful nature of God and the sinful nature of man.

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The language in Plato’s symposium and the expression of Sappho’s poetry are similar in that they both deal with homoerotic love. Sappho, the only ancient Greek female author whose work survived, talks from the female point of observation, where as Plato’s work concentrates on the idea of love among males. In spite of the fact that both of their points of view are comparative in courses, for example, their thoughts of physical fascination and want, Plato’s work creates a better understanding of the nature of love then Sappho’s ideas. This understanding will be shown with three arguments and counter- arguments in order to demonstrate the dominance of Plato over Sappho. It will than be concluded with an overview of the main idea and a recap of the three arguments made for Plato.

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Prayers to the gods could be used to get a crew or companion home safely. For example, Odysseus had a voyage that lasted for a long time, and many thought he had passed. Homer’s purpose of writing the Odyssey is to connect mythology to the lives of the people living in the time period of this epic poem and the reader’s lives using deus ex machina.

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Another influential factor expressed in Sappho’s writing was her sexuality. Disregarding the fact that she was married to a man for a brief period of time, Sappho found a great interest in women (Poetry Foundation). As an illustration, the poem “In My Eyes He Matches the Gods” is enthusiastic towards Sappho’s sexuality. This poem is about a women Sappho sees sitting across the room and with a man. Sappho is envious of said man and states it does not matter who the man is with this women, any guy would be like the gods getting to be with her, hence the name of the poem.

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The reader also sees this in Book 7 as Odysseus calls out to Athena through a prayer. Odysseus says, “Athena! Hear my prayers at last, for you have never heard me then, when I was shattered… Grant that here among the Phaecian people I many find some mercy and some love!” (7.356-357, 359-360).

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This invocation of the gods is typical of the ancient Greek dramas, where the first line calls upon the divinities for inspiration of the work, similar to an opening prayer. Examples include Homer’s great epic poems Odyssey and the Iliad, as well as the Homeric hymn to Pan, XIX, “They sing of the blessed gods and high Olympus and choose to tell of such and one as luck-bringing Hermes above the rest.” Pan, who was the son of the god Hermes, also favoured by Dionysus, “Then all the immortals were glad in heart and Bacchic Dionysus in especially; and they called for the boy Pan because he delighted all their hearts” (Evelyn-White 1914 as quoted in Astilla, 2007). There are surviving fragments of Sappho’s third and fourth odes, as translated

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The Iliad, written by Homer, is an ancient Greek epic about the Trojan War, which the divine certainly influences. Unlike how most gods might act or behave in books nowadays, the gods in the Iliad share some uncommon traits. For example helping their favorite morals, the idea of justice and harmony is surely excluded in the portrayal of Greek gods. The divine in the Iliad are characterized as very emotional and somewhat manipulative. Regardless of what occurs, it 's all the doing of the gods.

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