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Examples Of Cleverness In The Odyssey

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Cleverness is a trait every hero should have. Odysseus displayed how smart he is when he told Polyphemus, the Cyclops, that his name was “Nohbdy.” This was very smart of him because when Odysseus and his crew blinded Polyphemus, he kept screaming “Nohbdy’s tricked me, Nohbdy’s ruined me” (Homer 9, 317). When the other Cyclopes heard this, they thought that Polyphemus was talking nonsense because “nobody” was hurting him. This leads the other Cyclopes to leave Polyphemus alone without helping him. And because he was blinded, Odysseus and his men took advantage of it and devised another plan to escape. In addition to this, when the son of Laertes fathoms that the “honeyed plant, the Lotus” (Homer 44, 1112) somehow compelled his men and everyone else who ate it to stay on the island. This causes him to refuse the plant and drag his men back to the ship where he would proceed to tie them to their rowing benches. …show more content…
To escape Polyphemus, he devised a smart plan of tying his men under the Cyclops’ sheep. Since no one could tie him up, because the other men were already under the sheep, he “took the wooliest ram, and hung [himself] under [its] kinky belly, pulled up tight, with fingers twisted deep in sheepskin ringlets for an iron grip” (Homer 9, 341-345). It also stated that they “waited until morning” (Homer 246, 1120) which means that Odysseus held himself in that position the whole night. In order to do that, a person should be very, very strong to hold themselves under a large ram’s belly horizontally. Odysseus exhibited his extraordinary strength in this part of the

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