204 Huangdi his sheep In the 11th book Odysseus tries to make his peace with Poseidon, the god of the sea, who had supported the Trojans in the war The 12th book of the Odyssey covers the most famous incident, when Odysseus sails his ship past the land of the Sirens, women whose beautiful songs encourage sailors to sail too close to land so that their ships are dashed on the rocks Odysseus has his men fill their ears with beeswax and has himself tied to the mast of the ship so that he alone can hear their singing but can nothing about it The next book has Odysseus trying to reach Ithaca, arriving there bedraggled and alone In the remaining books Telemachus returns home, escaping an ambush laid by the suitors of Penelope He manages to meet up with his father, and with the promised help of two gods, Zeus and Athena, they decide to attack the suitors at the end of the 16th book By the 19th book Odysseus has met his wife but does not reveal his identity, although he is recognized by Eurycleia, a maid who had nursed the young Odysseus At the start of the 21st book Penelope offers to marry any man who can string the bow of Odysseus and fire it through 12 ax heads The suitors try, one by one, and fail, and Odysseus, still in disguise, asks to try as well Penelope says that if Odysseus, dressed as a poor man, does so, she will not marry him but will reward him He eventually does try, and succeeds, and Telemachus arrives on the scene In the 22nd book Odysseus, Telemachus, and others chase out the suitors, killing some of them Odysseus finally announces to his wife who he really is, tells of his adventures, and they are reunited The final book relates what happens when King Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War Instead of being welcomed by his wife Clytemnestra, she murders him made a sacrifice at the tomb of Protesilaus who was killed in the Trojan War and who was the first Greek warrior to set foot on Asian soil There have been a number of novels based on the stories in the Iliad and the Odyssey The Greek playwright Euripides wrote Cyclops based on the travels of Odysseus Geoffrey Chaucer set his poem Troilus and Creside at Homer’s Troy, and William Shakespeare used it for his play Troilus and Cressida George E Baker’s Paris of Troy and Richard Powell’s When the Gods Would Destroy all feature most of the characters from the Iliad Nikos Kazantzakis, in his The Odyssey, A Modern Sequel, continues the story of Odysseus after his return to Ithaca, and Odysseus (as Ulysses) has been important in the work of Dante and James Joyce CRITICAL DISCUSSION Some scholars have pointed to similarities with the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh Elements of the Odyssey were possibly adapted to form some of the Arabian stories concerning the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor and One Thousand and One Nights The epics have been used by scholars to understand much about the life of the Greeks of the period and about methods of fighting Homer’s epics have inspired many people One of those was Alexander the Great (356–323 b.c.e.) who traced his ancestry, through his mother, to Achilles He read the Iliad and the Odyssey when he was young, although he favored the former He must have remembered this when he arrived in Asia Minor and The late Spring and Autumn (722–481 b.c.e.) era and the Warring States (481–222 b.c.e.) era in China were marked by political chaos and social and economic change The Zhou (Chou) dynasty was impotent and relegated to the sidelines as powerful lords vied for total control Warfare became increasingly frequent and violent This was also the glorious age of Chinese philosophy; all China’s classical philosophical systems were developed during this time Thoughtful men, many of them administrators because of their education, were troubled by the chaos and sought answers They produced a broad spectrum of ideas that ranged from the concrete to the most abstract and from the practical to the purely theoretical The great variety of thought gave rise to the term See also Greek drama; Greek mythology and pantheon; Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon Further reading: Brackman, Arnold C The Dream of Troy New York: Mason and Lipscomb, 1974; Bradford, Ernle Ulysses Found London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964; Grosvenor, Melville Bell “Homeward with Ulysses.” National Geographic (July 1973); Payne, Robert The Gold of Troy London: Robert Hale, 1959; Rouse, W H D Homer London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1939; Schildt, Goran In the Wake of Odysseus London: Staples, 1953 Justin Corfield Huangdi See Yellow Emperor (Huang Di, or Huang Ti) Hundred Schools of Philosophy