"...So now they writhed, gasping as Scylla swung them up her cliff and there at her cavern's mouth she bolted them down raw - screaming out, flinging their arms toward me, lost in that mortal struggle ... Of all the pitiful things I've had to witness, suffering, searching out the pathways of the sea, this wrenched my heart the most."
The Odyssey, Book 12, Lines 275-282
Odysseus is a man who has suffered the most vexatious, extreme, excruciating pain over the course of 20 years; fighting bravely and better than most in one of the most epic wars in history in addition to being away from his beloved family and battling the endless obstacles on his way to native land. This quote is just from one of those many interferences, during the voyage through the man-eating monster Scylla's territory. Odysseus tells the story of this voyage, in which he lost six men to each of the Scylla's six lethal heads, and mentions that of all the physical and emotional pain he has had to suffer, "this wrenched my heart the most". The fact that he describes this event as the most pain he has experienced in these twenty years says a great deal about his character. He is someone who would choose themselves to die over any other, and it pains him most to see his men dying than it did to, for example, fight off the deadly Cyclops. Odysseus is a hero to be valued not only for his immense strength, but also for his chivalrous amiability.
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