Julius Caesar and The Odyssey Comparative Essay - 700 Words

Julius Caesar and The Odyssey Comparative Essay Throughout William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar and Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, loyalty is strongly presented as a major motif. In both texts, loyalty is highly valued as one of the most important traits to a person’s character. Not only do the loyal characters receive better fates, but those who are not loyal are punished for the actions, usually through revenge. In Julius Caesar, the characters that remained loyal to Caesar are the few who wind up alive at the end of the play, and in The Odyssey, those who remained loyal to Odysseus were rewarded by Odysseus, and those who weren’t were killed. In Julius Caesar, Cassius lead a group of conspirators, including Brutus, Caesar’s loyal†¦show more content†¦In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus is away from his home, Ithaca, for twenty years. Despite the low odds of Odysseus ever returning home after such a time, those in Ithaca were expected to remain loyal to Odysseus as they awaited his return. While this was a daunting task, those who accomplished it were heavily rewarded, while those who didn’t were met with death. Upon his return, Odysseus promised Eumaeus, the loyal swineherd, that he would find him a wife, grant him property next to his own, and that he would become one of the â€Å"comrades to Telemachus, brothers from then on† (21.243). His own wife Penelope remained loyal for all of the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence, never once giving in to the many suitors who invited themselves into her home and spent years vying for her hand. While she probably would have been killed by Odysseus if she had been unfaithful to him, perhaps her greatest reward was just being able to be with her husband again and being able to live. The suitors, however, were not so lucky. Odysseus, along with the help of the goddess Athena, carefully plotted and executed the death of every suitor that entered his home and gone after his wife. With the help of his son, the swineherd, and the goddess, Odysseus took down every suitor, until â€Å"the suitors lay in heaps, corpse covering corpse† (22.414). The resulting death of every disloyal character in the epic