Examples Of Loyalty In The Odyssey

Loyalty can be found in many different forms, but if there is loyalty, then there is also disloyalty. A wise man once mentioned that “Some people will only love you as much as they can use you. Their loyalty ends where the benefit stops”. This quote relates to many people in our world today. It even relates to Odysseus, the main character in The Odyssey by Homer. Odysseus leaves his home to fight in the war at Troy for ten years and spends another ten years traveling home. Odysseus brings his crew along on the journey, where many trials have to be faced and during those trials, many of the crew members were forced to face death. Throughout the course of their journey, Odysseus shows many signs of being disloyal to his crewmates, and one of those signs includes letting his loyalty be
Odysseus does not deserve the loyalty of his crew because he makes bad decisions for them. Odysseus is first held accountable for making bad decisions for his crew when he sends “two picked men and a third, a runner, to scout out” (9.100) to see who might live at the lotus-eaters island. This bad decision resulted in the crewmates resisting his orders and not wanting to go home. It ended in a huge waste of time for Odysseus and his crew. If Odysseus would have gone along with them then he could have prevented this from happening, but he made a bad decision of sending his three crew members alone. Because of Odysseus's poor decision to send his crew to the unknown land of the lotus-eaters, he does not deserve their loyalty. As Odysseus and his crew trudge along on their journey, Odysseus makes another bad decision by leading them into the Cyclops cave. Odysseus “picked out a dozen [of his] finest fighters and off [he] went (9.200-10) to the cyclops cave. Going to the Cyclops cave ended up