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Examples Of Wisdom In The Odyssey

564 Words3 Pages

Madeleine Berkeley
Ms. Ashley
English 9, 4th hour
8 March 2023
Odysseus and His Wisdom Throughout the Odyssey
In Homer’s The Odyssey, Odysseus uses wisdom to guide himself to safety many times after winning the Trojan War and starting his journey home to Ithaca. In Hidden Figures, the character Dorothy Vaughn has to use wisdom to figure out how to get the IBM computer to work. She was so brilliant that she was the only one at first to get it to work. Dorothy is like Odysseus because she thinks through how to do something and then does it but she also is different then Odysseus because she does not use her wisdom to brag she does not brag. Two circumstances when Odysseus uses his wisdom are when he escapes the cyclops and fights off the suitors. In both situations, he thinks before he acts, and uses guile to find out how to run these situations, Odysseus knows not to kill the cyclops but to blind him so that he and his crew can escape the cave because only the cyclops can move the stone. He also outsmarts the suitors when he shows up at his home. He knows that they will try and fight him, …show more content…

Homer describes cyclops how Odysseus “[T]hen slung a man under each middle one to ride there safety, shield left and right. So three sheep could convey each man (ln. 425-427). Odysseus was wise enough to know that the cyclops would feel his sheep’s wool as they went out of the mouth of the cave to graze. So Odysseus hid each one of his men strapped under the sheep. Not only does Odysseus have to escape the cave he also knows to not reveal who he is he does this by saying “my name is Nohbdy: mother, father, and friends call me Nohbdy”(ln. 360-361). Odysseus uses his wits while coming up with the false name, Nohbdy because he has an idea that the cyclops will cry out “Nohbdy’s hurting me!” after he gets blinded and then no one will come to save

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