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Odysseus: An Overrated Leader In Homer's Odyssey

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Being a leader is a complex role that is easy to mess up. Time and time again he endangers his crew up until their demise. Constantly Odysseus is shown to be brash and controlled via his emotions in moments of danger. Even after he begins to lose more and more men he continues to be insanely unremorseful. In the epic poem The Odyssey by Homer, Odysseus is overall an overrated leader with his biggest flaw being his horrible judgment
Even if it costs his men’s lives Odysseus will step into extremely risky situations, despite the fact that if he would set aside his curiosity they would leave all the better. In this scene Odysseus drags his men into the cyclops’s den in hopes for more resources not heeding his mens warnings “But he/ made no reply …show more content…

His tendency to taunt his enemy despite not being completely safe causes unnecessary tension. In this scene Odysseus taunts the cyclops he and his men barely escape” My taunting Made him angrier’ He ripped/ a rock out of the hill no hurt it at us’/ It landed right in front of our dark prow, and almost crushed the tip of the steering oar’/ The stone sam in the water; waves stirred up’” (book 9 480-484). Odysseus for some reason feeling confident despite the fact the Cyclops killed his men and began to cook them in front of him taunts the insanely powerful giant. His own lack of judgment scares his men and they beg him to stop taunting him yet he does not stop and the rocks continuously almost hit the ship. If even one of the rocks hit they all would have died. Odysseus is a careless leader to the point he did not notice when one of his own men died. In this scene we see that one of his men fell off a rooftop and cracked his neck. We meet him again when Odyseeus sees his ghost. “But I/ had bad luck from some God, and too much wine/ befuddled me’ In Circe’s I lay upstairs, and I forgot to use the ladder/ to climb down from the roof’ I fell headfirst”(book:11 59-63). Odysseus was so careless he could not even notice one of his men had gone missing let alone died. He left the member of his crew(of which being the youngest) dead without a burial, all because he never even considered doing a

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Odysseus in a leader that chooses to risk his and his men’s lives, just to get back to Ithaca and get back to his family. In the story “The Odyssey” by Homer, teaches us about Odysseus and how he demonstrates that a leader takes challenges and dangers in the hardest times. This late results of him risking the lives of his men and losing a couple men from his crew. The first time he risked his men’s lives was when they were running away from the Cyclops.

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