There is a quote by J.R.R Tolkien that goes “faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens”. In The Odyssey, written by Homer and translated by Robert Fagels, the crewmen perfectly embody this quote. If a person is truly loyal to someone then they will stick with them through tough times like crewmen do to their leader, but sometimes the leader may not deserve the loyalty he receives.
In the epic poem, the epic hero Odysseus and his crewmen go through a series of trials while trying to return home from the Trojan War. They have to escape a cyclops’s cave, sail past the monsters Scylla and Charybdis, escape cannibals, and more. They get through most of the trials with the help of the gods and sometimes Odysseus, but he is not always the best leader. Because Odysseus is not a good leader, he does not deserve the
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Although Odysseus goes back for his men and tries to look out for them, he does not deserve the loyalty of his crew because he is responsible for their misfortunes, he makes them do all the work, and he does not always focus on the task at hand.
Odysseus does not deserve the loyalty of his crew because he is responsible for their misfortunes. The earliest example of this is when Odysseus lets the crew open a bag of treasure that is given to them. The crew wants to “break it open- [right away]” but then “all the winds burst out and a sudden squall [strikes] and [sweeps] [them] out to sea, wailing, in tears, far from [their] own native land” (10.49-50). Even though Odysseus knows that the crew are not supposed to open the sack, he stands back and does nothing and it results in their ship and all the men being blown in the opposite direction of their end destination. Odysseus does things that he should not, like when he and his crew eat