The individual I admire most in European Culture—Odysseus 欧洲文化中我最敬佩的人—奥德修斯.doc

河北科技师范学院 欧洲文化入门论文 题 目the individual i admire most in european cultureodysseus 欧洲文化中我最敬佩的人奥德修斯专 业：英语（师范类） 班 级：1202 姓 名： 学 号：9012120211 after learning this course, i have got a clearer impression upon greek&roman mythology. throughout the whole story, the individual i admire most is odysseus, not only because he is smart, but his bravery and loyalty.during the trojan war, he persuaded achilles to help greeks conquer troy, but not like achilles, he is not fighting for himself, he knows what is right and wrong. he fights for the majority, not his own glory. moreover, the wooden horse has convincingly proofed his amazing intelligence. as an ancient chinese proverb goes, which is said by sun tzu: know yourself and know your enemy, you will win every war. odysseus knows his so well about achilles who wants to bring supreme honor to himself that he could succeed in persuading him, but whats more important, he also knows his enemy who pay too much attention to gods and would never resist any gift from them. achilles and wooden horse are the two most decisive elements contributing to the victory of greeks, and they both thank to the odysseus. i am so impressed.urged by this, i have developed a stronger interest in odysseus. so i read something about him after the trojan war and i formed a deeper understanding about this great hero- odysseus.speaking of hero, let me introduce my definition of hero before getting the rest of this story started. hero, for me, used to mean that the people who are very brave, selfless, and talented. just like yue fei in our country or martin luther king in the west. while after learning odysseus story, this definition has changed. everyone can be a hero, when he is brave enough to do the thing he wants to do, he knows what is right and what is wrong and under no circumstances he would commit the wrong, and he always follows his heart no matter how hard will it be and how much cost it will take. odysseus has no superpower, he is just like a regular man who wants to go home after getting tired from the war. he is, by all means, a true man, a true hero.odysseus is real, and this character makes him more heroic than any other heroes in my view. anyone who has superpower is easy to be a hero, like achilles, but thats too natural to be remembered impressively. what you can do with the superpower except being a hero? odysseus impressed me not because his great power, on the contrary, it is his lack of power that makes me think high of him. he is a hero of his own, he is a hero in my heart.on his voyage towards home, he has suffered a lot. he also gets frustrated, just like human, but he never gives up. it makes me notice that everyone frustrates all the time, but only some of them, only heroes, no matter he is the hero of nation or of his own, rise up.one piece of story of his voyage in the ocean attracts me most. odysseus and his followers or servants once were trapped on an island, where few food were on it. but, there were a lot of cattle belong to apollo. even there were starving, apollo tells them not to eat his cattle, or they would be punished. odysseus wants to go back home as fast as possible, so he talks his followers and servants out of eating them. nevertheless, these followers and servants were so hungry that they ate them in the end during odysseus was sleeping. when he wakes up, he was extremely stunned and anger and of course, they were punished by apollo thus delaying his journey back home for many years. nothing goes smoothly from the beginning to the end. no one is perfect from the birth till the death. odysseus also makes mistakes, but thats what a real man does. he keeps his followers hungry just for his awe to the god and his personal purpose to go home. from this story i have learned two things: a hero is not a person who never makes mistake, instead, is a person who is brave enough to make mistakes and correct them. another thing is that as a leader, your first responsibility is to guarantee your people the basic need of living. just imagine when people are starving or sick from cold, will they still consider you as a good leader? they even stop respecting god. what kinds of leader and god are they when they fail to provide their people with essential requirements of living?odysseus has made several mistakes, he has also been temped successfully several times during his voyage. nevertheless he eventually corrects and back to the right route. no one is perfect, even god envy. now i come to realize that maybe everyone has two sides in his heart: bright and dark. bright cannot always win, but it doesnt mean that one is evil when dark accidently takes charge. to judge if he or she is good or not, we have to look at the whole picture, to observe for a long time whether he or she is trying best to use the brightness to conquer the darkness or doing the opposite. likewise, a bad person is still a bad person when sometime he does a few good things.everyone has an evil part inside. when the basic need to live is deprived of, no one cares anything but to keep themselves alive. the evil which has been hiding emerges. it cannot be said that everyone acts like this, someone may be born with a bigger part of goodness, but it is true for ordinary people and as a leader, one should take as many things as he can into consideration as well as thinking of the majority first.this is odysseus in my point of view,