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Odysseus Bad Leader

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Odysseus Bad Leader
In the epic, The Odyssey, by Homer, it is known that Odysseus is a bad leader because he doesn’t give clear directions and he decides to venture to lethal places. Odysseus is someone who does not provide adequate directions to his crew, including the many times he tells his men something that they are not suppose to do that they still do. “Aeolus / , god of unfavorable winds / … bottling up unfavorable winds and sending them a fair breeze / … the men untie the bag of winds. And their ships are blown straight back to / Aeolus’ island,” (Page 506). Due to Odysseus’ unfaithfulness in his men, he didn’t tell them what was in the bag, leading up to his crew opening the bag out of curiosity, causing them to go all the way back to Aeolus’ island. Later on in Odysseus’s tale, they arrive in Thrinacia, which is Apollo’s island, because his men needs a needed a break from their exhausting journey. “Odysseus makes them swear not to touch / the god’s cattle / … disaster if the cattle were harmed,” (Page 513). When Odysseus’s men runs out of food and Odysseus is sleeping in a far-off cave, Eurylochus rounds up the crew. He then tells them to hunt …show more content…
“[Odysseus] [wishes] / to see the cave man, what he [has] to offer 一 / no pretty sight, it turned out, for my friends,” (Lines 154-156). Out of the twelve men Odysseus brought with him, only six6 survived by the time they figured out a way out of the cave. Odysseus knew of the fact that the cyclops species were extraordinarily powerful butand still goes into the cave. Before Odysseus has gone to the cyclop’s island, they had to stop in Cicones due to a storm sent by Zeus. “On the coast of the Cicones. / I stormed the place and killed the men who fought...six benches were left empty in every ship,” (Page 489). Thanks to Odysseus’s decision to stop in the Cicones, about six6 men in each ship of his army died to the

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