Heroic Leadership: Authority as Power

Abstract

The name of Homer is associated with two great epic poems — the Iliad and the Odyssey — which were required reading for well-educated people for more than 2,500 years. While scholarly debate about the true authorship of these poems continues to this day, our interest is confined to the Iliad, which dates from around 750 BCE, and describes the war between the Trojans and the Greeks (or ‘Danaans’ or ‘Achaeans’) that had occurred about 400 years earlier. This places the action in the heroic age which is associated historically with the Mycenaean civilisation of around 1600–1100 BCE.