Odysseus: A Great Leader

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Odysseus is a GREAT Leader
From the Odyssey, I have concluded that Odysseus was a great leader who used his wits to lead his men to a great cause. This starts off with Odysseus making a great decision to bring his 12 best fighters to go ahead and scout the newly found land, and I was very impressed by this because this decision was a good one because bringing his best men would make the whole scouting situation much better than having inexperienced men along with them. “If I killed him, we perished there as well, for we could never move his ponderous doorway slab aside”. From this part, Odysseus is using his critical thinking to plan out what to do to try to kill the Cyclops, but he realizes that if he tries to do something rash, he and his …show more content…
Starting off in the beginning, Odysseus makes the bad choice to only bring 12 men with him on the newly discovered place, and that to me is a bad decision because I think it is better to always have more people with you to better protect yourselves and how is Odysseus going to do that with only a measly group of 12 men? “My heart beat high now at the chance of action, and drawing the sharp sword from my hip I went along his flank to stab him”. From this part, I can clearly see Odysseus’s mind is thinking about doing something extremely rash and the consequences of this can be his death alongside his men, and I don’t like how he was thinking at the time because a great leader doesn’t make decisions like that, but instead, they think about their people’s lives first. “O Kyklops! Would you feast on my companions?” This part really made me understand how incompetent Odysseus was because he was starting to tease the cyclops and antagonize him, even though his men were screaming out, “why antagonize the beast again? Let him alone!” I can clearly see that he didn’t think about his men’s’ lives at all, and instead, only his own. I gathered from this passage that Odysseus was an irrational leader who made decisions that would’ve killed him and his men, and these qualities don’t make for a great leader but it makes for a terrible
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