How do prophecies affect Odysseus and Achilles?​

Both prophecies are bad for their well being, In The Odyssey Odysseus is warned by the blind prophet Tiresias that all of the sacred cattle of the Sun God Helios should be left alone. Tiresias says that the cattle should be avoided at whatever cost, and that if they are not, the men will all meet their doom. The prophecy that he would be killed either by Apollo or by Paris is treated vividly: Achilles falls in love with Polyxena, Priam's daughter, and arranges to meet Hecuba and Paris in the temple of Apollo Thrymbraeus in Troy. Paris and Deiphebus ambush him when he arrives, and they kill him.

Explanation:

The epic poets of the Silver Age of Roman Literature also labored

in different degrees under the triple burden of self-consciousness,

learning, and empty rhetoric. Their task was the more difficult

because Homer and Virgil had preceded them, so that whether they

chose an historical or mythological theme, they were timorously

conscious that they were doomed to second place. This is, for the

most part, only another way of saying that the epics under considera-

tion spring each from its own age. The ninth and eighth centuries

before our era could not have produced a poem suited for example

to the Alexandrian Age, when Greece, her great creative impulse lost,

became conscious of self and sought glory rather pedantically in her

great traditions; still less could those early centuries have given us

an epic of world empire. On the other hand, the age of Augustus and

even more the century that followed him were powerless to recover

the heroic spirit and adventurous temper of the Hellenic stocks on the

coast of Asia Minor when their world was young.

Prophecy, the foretelling of events, must carry the warrant of its

validity with it to gain attention. It may be given by a god or by one

who is divinely endowed with an understanding of signs and portents,

with a knowledge of fate and the future; if it be spoken by a mortal

who has received no special inspiration, the character and force of the

speaker, and the circumstances under which he speaks, must be such

as to carry conviction, or the effect is lost. Although the poet him-

self may utter prophecies, he rarely ventures to do so in the epic, for

this form of poetry is largely objective; he usually, therefore, leaves

the r1le of prophet to his characters. He may announce his theme

by calling on the Goddess to sing the wrath of Achilles, or by bidding

the Muse relate the fate of far-wandering Odysseus, after he had

sacked the sacred city of Troy; indeed, if he belong to a more sub-

jective age he may say openly, as does Apollonius the Rhodi

answer: wait what

explanation: