According to Homer ( Odyssey iv: 412 ), the sandy island of Pharos situated off the coast of the Nile Delta was the home of Proteus, the oracular Old Man of the Sea and herdsman of the sea-beasts.

Homer represents him as dwelling in the Elysian Fields ( Odyssey iv.

Alcinous' court bard sings of the discovered adultery of Ares and Aphrodite ( Odyssey 8 266-366 ), and takes up a tale of Odysseus while the Ithacan wanderer listens on ( Odyssey 8 499-520 ).

the poet of The Odyssey, reputed blind, reveals himself not at all in singing of the blind minstrel Demodocus.

That such a tradition lies behind The Iliad and The Odyssey, at least, is hard to deny.

the verse of Beowulf or of The Iliad and The Odyssey was not easy to create but was not impossible for poets who had developed their talents perforce in earning a livelihood.

One of the greatest Homerists of our time, Frederick M. Combellack, argues that when it is assumed The Iliad and The Odyssey are oral poems, the postulated single redactor called Homer cannot be either credited with or denied originality in choice of phrasing.

Combellack argues further, and here he makes his main point, that once The Iliad and The Odyssey are thought formulaic poems composed for an audience accustomed to formulaic poetry, Homeric critics are deprived of an entire domain they previously found arable.

If Cynewulf was literate, the Beowulf poet may have been also, and so may the final redactor of The Iliad and The Odyssey.

Thus one line in five from The Iliad and The Odyssey is to be found somewhere else in the two poems.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey.

Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in America: The Brutal Odyssey of an Outlaw Journalist, which contains hundreds of private letters written by Thompson over the years, contains a letter in which he uses A Modest Proposals satire technique against the Vietnam War.

Some of the oldest and most widespread stories in the world are stories of adventure such as Homer's The Odyssey.

Hephaestus is one of the most even-tempered of the Hellenic deities ; in the narrative embedded in the Odyssey Aphrodite seems to prefer Ares, the volatile god of war, as she was attracted to his violent nature.

" Odysseus ' Lies (' Odyssey ', Books 13-19 )" in Phoenix, Vol.

Science fiction set in what was the future but is now the past, like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Nineteen Eighty-Four, are not alternate history because the author has not made the conscious choice to change the past.

Both nectar and ambrosia are fragrant, and may be used as perfume: in the Odyssey Menelaus and his men are disguised as seals in untanned seal skins, " and the deadly smell of the seal skins vexed us sore ; but the goddess saved us ; she brought ambrosia and put it under our nostrils.

* In the Odyssey, Calypso is described as having " spread a table with ambrosia and set it by Hermes, and mixed the rosy-red nectar.

* In the Odyssey ( ix. 345 – 359 ), Polyphemus likens the wine given to him by Odysseus to ambrosia and nectar.

On Agamemnon's return from Troy he was murdered ( according to the fullest version of the oldest surviving account, Odyssey 11. 409 – 11 ) by Aegisthus, the lover of his wife Clytemnestra.

He is a significant figure in Homer's Iliad and is also mentioned in the Odyssey and Virgil's Aeneid.

* Homer, Odyssey 11. 543 – 67.

Homer mentions an Achaean attack upon the delta, and Menelaus speaks of the same in Book 4 of the Odyssey to Telemachus when he recounts his own return home from the Trojan War.

In the Odyssey, Menelaus relates to Telemachus that he had been becalmed here on his journey home from the Trojan War.

Prominent in both the Iliad and Odyssey, Menelaus was also popular in Greek vase painting and Greek tragedy ; the latter more as a hero of the Trojan War than as a member of the doomed House of Atreus.

Book 4 of the Odyssey provides an account of Menelaus ' return from Troy and his homelife in Sparta.

* In the Coen Brothers ' O Brother, Where Art Thou ?, which is loosely based on Homer's Odyssey, Academy Award nominated actor Charles Durning plays Governor Menelaus ' Pappy ' O ' Daniel.

In Odyssey, however, Homer narrates a different story: Helen circled the Horse three times, and she imitated the voices of the Greek women left behind at home — she thus tortured the men inside ( including Odysseus and Menelaus ) with the memory of their loved ones, and brought them to the brink of destruction.

Helen returned to Sparta and lived for a time with Menelaus, where she was encountered by Telemachus in The Odyssey.

He also appears in Book XV of the Odyssey, where he is shown offering valuable gifts to Telemachus together with Menelaus and Helen.

In the Odyssey, too, Homer's admiration of Nestor is tempered by some humor at his expense: Telemachus, having returned to Nestor's home from a visit to Helen of Troy and Menelaus ( where he has sought further information on his father's fate ), urges Peisistratus to let him board his vessel immediately to return home rather than being subjected to a further dose of Nestor's rather overwhelming sense of hospitality.

Their marriage is mentioned in Book 4 of the Odyssey, when Telemachus, son of Odysseus, visits Sparta and meets Helen and Menelaus.

According to Book III of Homer's The Odyssey, Menelaus and his fleet of ships, returning home from the Trojan War, were blown off course to the Gortyn coastline.

In The Odyssey by Homer, Menelaus recounts to Telemachus his journey home, and how he had to seek the advice of the Old Man of the Sea.

Attempts to find classical or Late Latin influence or analogue in Beowulf are almost exclusively linked with Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Aeneid.

In addition, the 2003 Radio Tales drama " Homer's Odyssey: Voyage to the Underworld " retells the portion of Homer's epic featuring Circe, followed by the voyage to Hades to consult with Tiresias.

The Odyssey with an English Translation by A. T. Murray, PH. D. in two volumes, Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press ; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1919.

" The games on the whole, however, rated last on his survey of over 200 games for the Atari, Intellivision, Astrocade and Odyssey consoles, and contemporary games were rated " Average " with future Channel F games rated " below average ".

In the 1920s, James Joyce managed " a more upbeat version " of Hamlet — stripped of obsession and revenge — in Ulysses, though its main parallels are with Homer's Odyssey.

It shows Ptolemy and his wife or sister Arsinoe III standing beside a seated poet, flanked by figures from the Odyssey and Iliad, with the nine Muses standing above them and a procession of worshippers approaching an altar, believed to represent the Alexandrine Homereion.

One often finds books of the Iliad and Odyssey cited by the corresponding letter of the Greek alphabet, with upper-case letters referring to a book number of the Iliad and lower-case letters referring to the Odyssey.

The primary antagonist in 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL ( Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer ) is an artificial intelligence that controls the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft and interacts with the ship's astronaut crew.

HAL is voiced by Douglas Rain in the two film adaptations of the Space Odyssey saga, and speaks in a soft, calm voice and a conversational manner, in contrast to the crewmen, David Bowman and Frank Poole, who speak tersely and with little emotional inflection.

A meeting with American television companies ( ABC, Métromédia, NBC ) created the series The Underwater Odyssey of Commander Cousteau, with the character of the commander in the red bonnet inherited from standard diving dress ) intended to give the films a " personalized adventure " style.

Odyssey used a technique called " aerobraking " that gradually brought the spacecraft closer to Mars with each orbit.

According to the Odyssey he spoke with Zeus every nine years or for nine years.

In 1995 Honda introduced the Odyssey, based on the Honda Accord with outswing doors with roll-down second row windows, a rear seat that folded into the floor, and a 140 hp inline four engine.

The Odyssey opens in medias res, in the middle of the overall story, with prior events described through flashbacks or storytelling.

* The 1954 Broadway musical The Golden Apple by librettist John Treville Latouche and composer Jerome Moross is freely adapted from the Iliad and the Odyssey, re-setting the action to the American state of Washington in the years after the Spanish-American War, with events inspired by the Iliad in Act One and events inspired by the Odyssey in Act Two.

* An excerpt from the Odyssey appears in graphic-novel form, with art by Gareth Hinds, in volume one of the anthology The Graphic Canon.

They succeeded in bringing the first home video game system to market, the Odyssey, which was quickly followed by a number of later models, each with a few technological improvements ( Magnavox Odyssey Series ).

Early poems evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese Shijing, or from a need to retell oral epics, as with the Sanskrit Vedas, Zoroastrian Gathas, and the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.