The Essay The Odyssey begins by defending the hero against the charge that he was responsible for his failure to bring home his crew:
Many cites of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove--
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod blotted our the day of their return. (1.4-10)Clearly, a leader who saves himself but not his people has some explaining to do. After all, the primary task of a leader is to guard his people, to protect them as a shepherd safeguards his flock. "Shepherd of the people" is a Homeric epithet for kings in the Iliad. Yet at key moments in the Odyssey Odysseus is asleep or otherwise distracted. How can we square these lapses with Athena's portrayal of the hero as the type of the good king? At the council on Olympus in Book 5, she tries to shame Zeus into intervening on her favorite's behalf by suggesting the disastrous social consequences of letting such a good king continue to suffer exile from his home:
Father Zeus--you other happy gods who never die--
never let any sceptered king be kind and gentle now,
not with all his heart, or set his mind on justice--
no, let my be cruel and always practice outrage.
Think: not one of the people who he ruled
remembers Odysseus now, that godlike man,
and kind as a father to his children. (5.8-14)Is Odysseus really a good leader? We never get the chance to see him as a king ruling Ithaca, but our view of his leadership in Books 9-12 of the poem indicates that he is. Although he sometimes fails to protect his crew, Odysseus demonstrates the courage, foresight, and devotion that distinguish the best leaders.
To be sure, sometimes his curiosity, lust, or pride temporarily blinds him to the welfare of his crew. There is no denying that he endangers them when he decides to investigate the land of the Cyclopes, especially when he disregards their pleas to leave the cave of Polyphemus before the monster returns: "But I would not give way--/ And how much better it would have been--/ not till I saw him, saw what gifts he'd give" (9.256-8). Likewise, he foolishly taunts the blinded Cyclops after their escape from the cave, letting his own anger and pride put them all at risk by alerting him to their presence. They only just escape when the huge boulder Polyphemus hurls in their direction overshoots the mark and almost washes them back up on shore. Later, Odysseus is so beguiled by Circe's charms that he delays their departure from her island for a year, leaving only when his comrades beg him to be gone. Finally, when confronting Scylla, he forgets Circe's firm advice to refrain from any attempt to fight this deadly and irresistible foe, though any attempt to respond to her attack could only mean the loss of more crew members.
Nonetheless, he shows exemplary leadership in moments of crisis. In the cave of the Cyclops his superior foresight and planning, together with his courage, confidence, and force of personality, enable him to rescue the majority of his crew from apparently certain death. That first night trapped in the cave, he would have found it easy to kill the sleeping giant, and with the unprovoked murder of his comrades he has every incentive to act. Nonethless, he overcomes his anger and stays his hand, realizing that without the brute force of the Cyclops to move aside the boulder blocking the entrance to the cave none would ever escape their prison. Armed, above all, with his superior intelligence, he devises and executes a cunning plan to blind rather than to kill his enemy. Especially prescient is his decision to call himself "Nobody," which prevents the Cyclops from communicating to his peers that a human being is responsible for his pain. When the time comes to attack, Odysseus shows his ability to command his forces. With his own courage and confidence as example and backed by a brief speech, he prevails over their fears at the decisive moment of action: "[I] rallied all my comrades:/ 'Courage--no panic, no one hang back now!' " (9.421-2). On the island of Circe, he does not let fear for his own safety prevent him from rescuing the half of his crew that has succumbed to the goddess' spell. At the outset he shows due prudence by dividing his forces in two, and sending only one contingent to reconnoiter the island. When Eurylochus returns, frightened by Circe's power, and begs him to flee--'Quick, cut and run with the rest of us here--/ we can still escape the fatal day' (10.297-298)--, Odysseus does not let his subordinate's panic sway him or override his loyalty to his crew. His contemptuous and characteristically terse reply shows that a captain must be made of sterner stuff than those he leads:
But I shot back, 'Eurylochus, stay right here,
eating, drinking, safe by the black ship.
I must be off. Necessity drives me on.' (10.299-301)The difference between Odysseus and Eurylochus is highlighted in the fatal episode when the crew eats the cattle of the Sun and insures their own destruction.
In Book 12 Homer makes it clear that Odysseus is not to blame for the ultimate destruction of his crew. Without the means to enforce his will upon his comrades, he must rely on example and verbal persuasion. When they insist on stopping at Thrinacia, he tries his best to dissuade them:
"Listen to me, my comrades, brothers in hardship,
let me tell you the dire prophecies of Tiresias
and Aeaean Circe too: time and again they told me
to shun this island of the Sun, the joy of man." (12.294-7)Instead, they listen to the specious arguments of Eurylochus and their own fatigue. When the winds prevent their subsequent departure and they run out of supplies, Odysseus prevents them from eating the forbidden cattle, until the day when fate overrides his human powers of vigilance. It is due to no dereliction of duty that he is fast asleep when Eurylochus once more moves the crew to folly. The gods themselves send down the irresistible gift of sleep to insure the crew's destruction:
but soon as I'd prayed to all the gods who rule Olympus,
down on my eyes they poured a sweet, sound sleep ...
as Eurylochus opened up his fatal plan to friends.... (12.363-5)Can we trust this self-defense? Did the gods really make him fall asleep? In the course of the poem never once does someone fall asleep through some weakness of will. Again and again Athena casts a sweet sleep on Penelope, who has no choice but to succumb. And we have the narrator's emphatic defense of the hero: it was his comrades' folly that did them in, he tells us at the beginning of the poem.
Thus, the evidence shows that Odysseus is, by and large, a good leader. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that leadership is not a major theme in the poem. We see Odysseus in the role of a leader of a band of men only in books 9-12. Elsewhere he operates for the most part alone, and even when he relies on the assistance of Telemachus and Eumaeus in the final battle against the suitors, he gives very few orders and takes direction from his son on at least one occasion. To be sure, from the time that he returns to Ithaca, he takes over the role of mentor to his son that Athena played in his absence, instilling confidence in him and encouraging his efforts to take responsibility. In this capacity, however, he is acting as a father, the patriarchal head of the family whose task is to prepare for his son's succession. This is leadership only in the broadest sense of the term, and not an example of the political responsibility that kings must exercise. Although Odysseus is the king of Ithaca, his kingdom does not seem to be suffering in his absence, unlike his own household, and that the people of the island have taken no steps to fill the leadership vacuum. In this respect the poem portrays a social world in which politics remains at a rudimentary level. Homer is looking back to a time before the rise of the city-states that dominated the forms of social life in seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries before the common era. As new forms of social life emerge in the centuries after Homer, the figure of Odysseus will undergo a transformation in literary tradition, and his cleverness, viewed in isolation from a broader social purpose, will come to be seen as something sinister. The Homeric hero turns into the Virgilian villain.
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These materials were created by David Enelow.