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After colonizing their own peninsula the Greeks set out across the Aegean and started encountering the many different cultures and peoples that occupied these lands. Mariners came home from these voyages with tales of wondrous lands and strange peoples and these tales influenced the storytellers of the Greeks. Poets like Homer and playwrights like Aeschylus started incorporating these barbarians into their heroic tales and historic dramas as a way to create foreign opposition for their heroes and the one unifying aspect of their tales is how they describe these strangers from strange lands. These writers and many others that wrote in the Greek tradition showed foreigners as the exact opposite of the Greeks, they characterized these new peoples by their differences and then completely exaggerated these aspects to make them seem like the down to the Greek up, the black to the Greek white. Homer’s Odyssey is one of the Greek epic poems that show extreme differences in foreigners. During Odysseus’ travels he encounters many different peoples like the Cyclopes, Lotus Eaters, Laestrygonians, Phaiakians, and even minor gods and monsters. When we first see these peoples through the eyes of Odysseus, they are shown to be extremely d