Odysseus is quite different from the “epic” heroes that predate him — the Sumerian Gilgamesh or even the Greek Achilles, for example — he is not all muscles and no brain, and he is fully human on both sides of his parentage. Find as many similarities and differences as you can between Odysseus and Gilgamesh. These might rightly fall into three categories: 1) their stories (deeds), 2) their personal character qualities 3) the cultural expectations — in other words, their audience’s expectations of what a hero should be (were they different? how had they changed by the time of Odysseus?) How different are these two from our own expectations of a “hero?”
