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Odysseus Role In Homer's Odyssey

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After Odysseus returns from his encounter with Circe, a beautiful witch-goddess who drugs and bewitches Odysseus’s most able crewmen, his men are more than relieved to see him and they flock around him as if he is their master and their shepherd. Odysseus is a man who is respected by his crew and treated as a mortal god by the heavens above. As shown in this scene, his men are stuck in the middle of a cross road without his guidance, pivoting towards all directions but incapable of moving forward with a plan. They are “wailing and crying besides [the] sailing ship”(10.433) without any sense of hope and direction in life. They are missing a leader who will lead them in war and guide them back home; they are missing Odysseus. Despite Odysseus’s …show more content…

Whether if it is through Athena’s words of wisdom that lead him to the correct direction, or in this particular scene, Hermes’s instructions for overpowering the dreadfully beautiful witch, the gods continue to favor Odysseus and make him an outlier of men, forever exempt from death and failure. He is “Odysseus, great Laertes’s son, known for [his] cunning throughout the world, and [his] fame reaches even to the heavens”(9.21-23) He is a man whose abilities are given by the gods and his life is blessed by Zeus himself. In some essence, Odysseus is sculpted to become the leader he is today, a respected and charismatic hero who is welcomed by his men with tears of joy and cries of relief, even before his birth and the start of the trojan war. Odysseus is predestined to be the hero blessed by the gods. He is given the best instructions and the perfect weapons to combat every enemy that approaches him, and is given a magnetic wand that always attracts his team to follow him onto the destined path. Odysseus is a leader with the mind of a god, the direction and the foundation of the crew, and the very thing that makes his men function as a

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