Odysseus: A War Hero

In today’s society many things can be considered as heroic. In the epic poem, The Iliad and the Odyssey by legendary Greek author, Homer. The main character is a war hero named Odysseus is very intelligent and really strong but is also portrayed as arrogant and at times a horrible leader at times but he is still a war hero nonetheless. But the times have changed, the men who fight in war are no longer worshipped how they were in the ancient times. So with that being said, Odysseus would not be considered a hero today. Although Odysseus was a war hero, he did not represent justice or equality like heroes now do. You think of real life heroes such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Even fictional characters such as Superman and Spiderman, they all share one quality which is they all stand up for justice. So then you may ask, what does Odysseus stand up for? The answer is, he truly only stands up for his reputation and is really arrogant. In the Iliad, after the Greeks victory over Troy, he yells out to the gods that Greece and he does not need them to win. This alone causes him and his crew to have a rough trip home. Also in the Odyssey, after escaping from Polyphemus, after he can just leave it as is. He yells out that his name is Odysseus and is from Ithaca, and this causes Polyphemus to send a prayer
You may be asking yourself, how can he be a bad leader if he is the reason they won at Troy and got home? Well the answer is that it took them 10 years to get back to Ithaca. It took long because of Odysseus doing horrible things such as telling Polyphemus his name. Because of Odysseus’ doing this, its causes him and his men to be a target for the gods. Another example of this is when Odysseus receives a bag of wind from Aeolus and he does not communicate with his men and causing them to think that it is a bag of riches. So you can not blame them for being curious because after all it is in our nature as human