Odysseus Leadership In The Odyssey

Throughout Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, the reader or viewer has the opportunity to see the story’s main protagonist make leadership decisions, and take actions, that range from critical to minor in terms of importance. But the fact is that Odysseus is a leader. And that is the key thing to keep in mind no matter how you experience the poem. Inevitably, when you are talking about leaders, the questions arise: is he or she good or bad? What is the metric and what is your method of evaluation? In this case, we’ll look at Odysseus’ performance through a modern leadership lens, while keeping in mind that Homeric Greek culture might have motivated him to act differently than he would have today. Nevertheless, until he ultimately

He angers the gods, burns bridges with people throughout his journey, and is responsible for the deaths of a lot of his men. But back home on Ithaca, he shows that he is a worthy and invaluable leader as king. Administratively and tactically, Odysseus is an extremely flawed leader, but he possesses other sometimes intangible leadership abilities that make him stand out as a decent overall leader. Lots of examples of Odysseus’ leadership, good, bad and in between, are contained in his own accounts of his travels. We’ll start looking at Odysseus leadership with a trip to the sunny island of Sicily, and his encounter with the ancient world’s most famous one-eyed monster, the cyclops. Odysseus himself admits that he made a bad move by staying in the cave “From the start my comrades pressed me, pleading hard, ‘lets make away with the cheeses, then come back–’” (9.251,252). To be fair, Odysseus really would not have had the slightest notion that the cyclops wasn’t going to be a good host until the cave’s owner said “‘Strangers’” (9.284). At that point, slab at the door or no slab, Odysseus should’ve begun using his legendary cunning and guile in an attempt to get out of that cave. He should have offered Polyphemus wine right

Even with the benefit of hindsight, and without actually seeing the interior of the cave that they were in, we can’t know if there is any way he could’ve prevented four more of his men from being killed in the cave — two becoming human breakfast burritos for the Cyclops (9.348), and two more an evening meal (9.384). But we do know that Odysseus spent the time that Polyphemus was out shepherding scheming a way to get the remaining six of his men out of the cave and back to the relative safety of the ships. He did it by getting the beast to think that our hero’s name was “Nobody” instead of Odysseus, getting it drunk until it passed out, and stabbing it in the eye with a huge, sharp and fiery post. That got Polyphemus to remove the slab. Through some other clever thinking, he eventually got the rest of his men to the ships and they safely got underway. And it is at this particular point that Odysseus displays some conspicuously poor leadership. Instead of cutting his losses and and sailing away after losing just six men, he