Odysseus Decision To Die In Homer's Odyssey

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If you knew someone was going to die tomorrow, would you tell them? Odysseus was in a similar situation in the Odyssey, an epic poem by Homer when he knew that his crew was going to die according to some prophecies, but he kept that information to himself. Odysseus’s decision to withhold information about the prophecies of Tiresias and Circe was the right choice because telling the crew may have caused different reactions among them, it prevents the crew from worrying about future events and giving up, and it forces the crew to give all their effort in the face of death. If Odysseus were to tell his crew about the prophecies and how they might die, they could have been able to brush it off and keep fighting, or they could have given up completely. Odysseus had fought alongside these men for at least ten years, but everyone reacts to their death …show more content…
Even though they were scared when they came across Scylla and Charybdis, the crew acted on instinct in order to escape death. Odysseus wanted them to live or die trying, so the crew followed his order and gave all of their efforts. If Zeus had not destroyed their ship, they surely would have helped Odysseus to keep trying to get home to Ithaca. The entire crew gave all they could, but Odysseus had no way of knowing if they were going to act this way if they had knowledge of the prophecies beforehand. Odysseus did what he thought was right as the leader of the crew by keeping the fact that the crew was going to die a secret. He made sure that they would not act differently because of their fateful death by avoiding breaking the news in the first place. If Odysseus told his crew that they were going to die, they could have made the situation worse by giving up or taking matters into their own hands regarding their death. If you were Odysseus, wouldn’t you save your crew from losing hope

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