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Published on 24/07/2026 [ View profile on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://neoma-bs.com/news/odysseus-man-thousand-roundabout-ways-which-detour-will-nolan-take) [ View profile on X-twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?urlhttps://neoma-bs.com/news/odysseus-man-thousand-roundabout-ways-which-detour-will-nolan-take) [ View profile on Linkedin](https://linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=https://neoma-bs.com/news/odysseus-man-thousand-roundabout-ways-which-detour-will-nolan-take) [ View profile on Email](mailto:?subject=https://neoma-bs.com/news/odysseus-man-thousand-roundabout-ways-which-detour-will-nolan-take) [ View profile on Copy](javascript:void(0);https://neoma-bs.com/news/odysseus-man-thousand-roundabout-ways-which-detour-will-nolan-take) ## ***Odysseus has come to embody the archetype of the ideal leader. Christopher Nolan brings him to the screen on July 15, and his*** **Odyssey** ***– literally, the “epic of Odysseus” – can be read in a different light: less as a leadership handbook or a model to emulate than as a matchless meditation on the challenges of human freedom.*** Opinion piece published in *Le Figaro* magazine Odysseus has long since been cast in the role of hero in our schools and beyond. He is a strategist, cunning, tough, and triumphant. He stands as an exemplary leader, frequently invoked in leadership seminars alongside case studies for his unwavering commitment to his mission, his kingship, his family, and his crew. On July 15**,** Christopher Nolan brings Odysseus to the big screen in a full‑scale worldwide blockbuster, giving millions of cinema-goers the chance to return to the poem, whose vanished melody Ismail Kadare so beautifully sought to recover in his 1981 novel *The File on H*. To reread what is known as the proem (from the Latin *proemium*, meaning “the beginning”) is to be brought up short by Odysseus’s name from the very first line. Achilles is named in the opening verses of *The Iliad*. Odysseus, by contrast, is identified only as “the man” (*andra*) and by the epithet *polytropos* (“of many turns” – perhaps). Leconte de Lisle rendered *andros polytropos* as *cet homme subtil* (“this subtle man”); Victor Bérard as *l'homme aux mille tours* (“the man of a thousand turns”); and Philippe Jaccottet, in his sublime, unsurpassed verse translation, as *l'inventif* (“the inventive one”). Above all, however, *polytropos* describes the man who, like the poem that bears his name, makes a virtue of ambiguity: not when ambiguity is a synonym for duplicity, but when it is a mark of fidelity to the complexity of reality and a call for deeper inquiry. Indeed, the poem that has shaped our collective imagination about leadership offers us not answers but questions. ### ***Metis*****: the intelligence needed to navigate uncertainty** Let us begin by giving Odysseus his due. His accomplishments are genuine. He is Athena's man, the master of cunning, what the Greeks call *metis*, the supple intelligence that adapts to the unexpected, like that of a helmsman in stormy seas. Odysseus has nothing in common with Ares, the god of war, whom Athena herself lays low in *The Iliad* and whom Zeus claims to despise more than any other Olympian. Odysseus does not stir troops to battle; he thinks. He is *primus inter pares,* the first among equals*,* the finest archer and the finest strategist, with the Trojan horse serving as his calling card. And he even learns from his failures: vanquished by the Cicones because his men, intoxicated, turned a deaf ear to his order to withdraw, he later transforms drunkenness into a weapon to blind the Cyclops. Odysseus’s stroke of genius, in fact, rests on a single word. To deceive the monster, he gives his name as “Nobody” – *Outis*, a Greek pun on *metis*. When Polyphemus, blinded, cries out that he is under attack, his fellow Cyclopes merely shrug their shoulders: “Nobody has done anything to him”. It is hard not to admire Odysseus. Yet it is in this much-celebrated episode of Book IX that the picture becomes more complicated. Odysseus’s master stroke lies in accepting, if only for the duration of a ruse, to become nobody. We do precisely the opposite: our age celebrates the leader who has a name, a brand, a presence – the star executive, the personal stamp, the profile that stands out. There is nothing new in this. At Troy, Greece already had its hero of glory: Achilles, who was willing to die young so long as his name would live forever, as Phaedrus and Socrates (the guests in Plato’s *Symposium*) remind us. ### **To be nobody or to be somebody** Unlike *The Iliad*, whose title evokes the Trojan War (*Ilion*), *The Odyssey* takes its name from its hero, Odysseus: the man. No longer the epic of war, it is the epic of humanity, of wandering and the risk of losing oneself. The sea is its perfect stage, with a calm surface and turbulent depths: a place where you can lose your bearings, but also a place where a skilled navigator relies on landmarks to reach safe harbour. *The Odyssey*, it seems, rewards those who know how to erase themselves and defeat those who cannot bear to do so. Scarcely out of danger and carried away by exhilaration, Odysseus shouts out his real name to Polyphemus, handing the giant the opportunity to curse him all the way back to Ithaca. The same man triumphs when he calls himself “Nobody” and loses when he insists on being recognised as “Odysseus, sacker of cities, son of Laertes and noble citizen of Ithaca” in his encounter with the Cyclops. He still has many wanderings ahead of him, and he must be recognised in turn by the swineherd Eumaeus, his son Telemachus, his dog Argos (who dies the moment he sees his master again), then by the nurse Eurycleia (by means of the scar), and finally by Penelope, before at long last he can become Odysseus once more and reclaim his throne, this time in his own name. Which Odysseus has the clearer vision? ### **Leadership that never listens** Although the wandering king shapes our imagination of what a leader is, he is anything but a flawless leader. And this is precisely what makes Odysseus so interesting. At times, he listens to his men with half an ear. So, on the Cyclops' island, Odysseus’s companions entreat him to leave. But his curiosity gets the better of him, he wants to “see him” and find out whether the Cyclops will offer him “the gifts” that are part of traditional Greek hospitality. He does whatever he wants and his men pay for it with their lives. Elsewhere, it is Odysseus who is no longer listened to. Whether through mishearing or failing to be heard, *The Odyssey* lays out the two pitfalls of leadership without taking sides. Nor should we forget that, although *The Odyssey* consists of twenty-four books, the first four are devoted not to Odysseus (who is absent) but to Telemachus. And that many readers, moreover, are familiar only with Books IX to XII, which are in fact Odysseus' own telling of events, a “flashback,” as Nolan might put it, given at the court of the Phaeacians. The Sirens? The Lotus Eaters? The Underworld? The cattle of Helios? The Cicones? The Laestrygonians? Aeolus' bag of winds? All these adventures are simply part of Odysseus’s “storytelling” as he enjoys the hospitality of King Alcinous on the island of the Phaeacians. Are we to believe him when he stages his own cunning, his “epic fails” and his wavering? There is no doubt that the director of *Inception* will know how to exploit this interplay of temporal layers and shifting points of view, which are also questions of leadership... ### **Can we call it success when the team has been lost?** Finally, we come to the question that makes our head spin. Odysseus achieves his goal: he returns to Ithaca. But he returns alone. Over seven hundred of his men have died along the way. Mission accomplished? Put in modern language, it is a collective burnout in pursuit of a single objective. *The Odyssey* tells the story of a *nostos*, a homecoming, the Greek word that gives us “nostalgia”. But wasn’t the goal to return home with his men? From this perspective, the hero has failed. The idea is nothing new. As early as the fourteenth century, Dante casts Odysseus into his *Inferno*, placing him among the fraudulent counsellors for having led his men “beyond” the Pillars of Hercules, condemned for his boundless curiosity. Three centuries later, Fénelon reached a very different conclusion: *Les Aventures de Télémaque* is a “spin-off” of *The Odyssey*, written to educate the heir to the throne of France, a European *“bestseller”*, and, incidentally, the source of our modern word “mentor”. The moral of the story? The good king is not a king who triumphs, but who serves his people rather than his own glory. “When you become the master of other men, remember that you were once weak, poor and suffering like them,” says Mentor to Telemachus in Book II of the novel. (Louis XIV reportedly saw in this a criticism of his own reign.) Today, alongside Nolan’s adaptation, the New York writer Daniel Mendelsohn – who revived Fénelon’s *Télémaque* in *Three Rings* (2021), winner of France’s Best Foreign Book Prize – has recently published a new translation of *The Odyssey* to widespread critical acclaim. Everything hinges, precisely, on the translation of the opening epithet (*polytropos*). Mendelsohn follows the tradition of Victor Bérard’s *l’homme aux mille tours* (“the man of a thousand turns”), but shifts the emphasis: with his translation “a man who had so many roundabout ways”, he downplays the character’s cunning and highlights his circuitous character. ### **An** ***Odyssey*** **that challenges our ideas of leadership** Each era rereads, rewrites, and reimagines the *Odyssey* in order to examine its own conception of power. So thought-provoking is the epic that Plato described Homer as “the educator of all Greece”. While Dante transforms Odysseus into a soul damned to Hell, Fénelon recasts him as a father whose quest the future king of France must undertake in order to lay the foundations of wise and measured leadership. Mendelsohn, meanwhile, weighs every word anew. And now cinema, in turn, is embracing *The* *Odyssey*: proof, if proof were needed, that the poem has lost none of its power to captivate. Perhaps this is our epic poem’s greatest gift: beneath the veneer of adventure lies not a handbook for the ideal leader to emulate or condemn, but a mirror held up to our own ambivalences. We admire the strategist who triumphs; the poem asks at what cost. We celebrate the hero who has a name; it reminds us that his greatest stratagem was knowing, if only for a moment, how to be nobody. We speak of results; it counts those who are missing. As Odysseus prepares to return to the big screen, his story may well revive a question: at what price does one succeed? And what does success ultimately mean when you are responsible for others? Three thousand years on, *The Odyssey* continues to defy all attempts to turn it into a leadership manual. It never canonises a single model; instead, it compels every age to re‑examine its own. Agathe Mezzadri-Guedj teaches in the ECG and ECT preparatory classes and at NEOMA Business School. She holds the *agrégation* in modern French literature and a doctorate in French language and literature. Mezzadri-Guedj’s doctoral dissertation on Fénelon, author of *Les Aventures de Télémaque*, was awarded the Société d’Étude du XVIIe siècle prize and was published by Classiques Garnier in 2020. Her research has subsequently continued to focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Fénelon, Madame Guyon, Marie-Françoise Locquet and the afterlife of Saint-Simon in François Bon). Mezzadri-Guedj’s next publication will explore Fénelon’s conception of creation in the *Lettre à l’Académie* (due to appear in autumn 2026). She will also speak at a conference on anger in the classical age in 2027, analysing its role in *Les Aventures de Télémaque*. ## Related news ![Arts et humanités : territoire d'excellence pour NEOMA ](/sites/default/files/styles/picture_card/public/uploaded_images/territoire-arts-et-humanites-neoma.png?itok=_LrCktkq) ### [ The arts and humanities: human skills beyond the reach of machines ](https://neoma-bs.com/news/arts-and-humanities-human-skills-beyond-reach-machines) 13/06/2026 [School life](https://neoma-bs.com/neoma-s-world?cat=school-life) In the face of AI, NEOMA is committed to fostering students’ critical thinking and creativity. 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