Paragraph 2    In this paragraph we will work on defending your thesis with strong supporting arguments. Key topics are: strong topic sentences, strong supporting arguments, avoiding plot summary, factual errors, opinion versus argument, counter-arguments, rebuttals, and summing up your points.

     Trickery appears quite often in The Odyssey. When Odysseus encounters the Cyclops Polyphemos, he confronts an enemy larger than himself. On the Cyclopes' island, there are none of the usual signs of civilization: there is no harbor, no ships, no cultivation, nothing but wild savages living in isolation from one another.In an episode probably written to please the masses with its humor, Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops's cave by stating that his name is Nobody, so that when the Cyclops is blinded, Polyphemos cries out to his fellow Cyclopes : "Good friends. Nobody is killing me by force or treachery" (Odyssey, p. 147). Killing the savage Polyphemos through trickery is truly heroic. One could certainly argue that trickery is not heroic; after all, the Bible condemns it. But as I have already shown, it is heroic, since Homer shows that Odysseus uses it to defeat the Cyclops.