Power relations are featured in different ways in different literary works, and often how power is portrayed is dependent on the historical era from which the work emerges. Power is seen in stark terms in many works in which human beings act out power plays fueled by ambition, hatred, lust, and similar basic emotions. In ancient Greece, represented by The Odyssey, Homer shows human beings not only as power brokers in their own right but as pawns in power struggles among the gods. Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels satirizes the operation of political power in his own era, while Machiavelli in The Prince suggests how political power should be taken, utilized, and maintained by the ruler.
Odysseus in The Iliad is presented as the shrewdest of the Greeks as well as a great warrior. It is Odysseus who devises the gift of the Trojan Horse, the action which leads to the fall of Troy. At the beginning of The Odyssey, he is found imprisoned on Calypso's island ten years after the end of that war. When we meet him in this epic poem, he is a man in such despair at his fate that he has given up even trying to get home. He is resigned to his fate until Athena comes to him and gives him back his courage, after which he is able to sail for home once more.
He will be the last of the Greeks to reach home. His failure to reach home before is attributable in part to his offending of Poseidon, the god of the sea, which occurs when he and his men are trapped in a cave by the Cyclops, Polyphemus, also the son of Poseidon. Odysseus blinds the Cyclops, and as a consequence Poseidon prevents his ships from completing their journey. There is other evidence that Odysseus has been abandoned by the gods. Aeolus gives the warrior a bag containing all the winds except the beneficent west wind, the intention being to help the Greeks reach home. All they have to do is keep the bag closed, but before Odysseus's ships can reach land, the bag is ...