Who is the best of the Greeks?
According to Homer, it was Achilles, their greatest fighter of the Trojan War.
Except Achilles was a demigod, having a mortal dad (Peleus) and a goddess mum (Thetis). So he had a bit of an advantage over the others.
But then he went ahead and got himself killed when an arrow hit his famous heel.
Afterwards, King Agamemnon had a choice to make about who to give Achilles’ armor to, the finest armor ever made.
Agamemnon decided to give it to the man who qualified as “The Best of The Greeks,” the position formerly occupied by Achilles.
There were two candidates.
1. Ajax: everybody’s best friend. The most loyal man in the army, physically bigger and stronger than anyone else, and the fiercest warrior of them all.
2. Odysseus: the cleverest of the Greeks – he designed the Trojan Horse- plus he was the smoothest talker and most deviously strategic of them all.
Agamemnon thought the fairest thing to do was to give both men an equal opportunity to make their case in front of everyone.
Ajax made his case – and it was a good one – but of course, Odysseus, with his unsurpassed oratory skills wiped the floor with him.
Having lost the armor, Ajax fell into a rage. He was so unhappy that he went on a rampage and then committed suicide.
The way things went down made both Team Odysseus (“We won fair and square!”) and Team Ajax (“Oh no you didn’t!”) deeply unhappy. It got to the point where the Greeks almost called off their war with Troy, in order to go fight each other. While it got deescalated in the end when Odysseus convinced Agamemnon to have Ajax buried with full military honors, it was pretty dicey there for a minute.
The question is, did Agamemnon make a mistake by choosing the wrong guy? Perhaps he should have chosen Ajax instead?
Agamemnon’s real mistake was in thinking that a good choice could be made like that in the first place. An army needs the brains and cunning of Odysseus just much as it needs the bravery, loyalty and toughness of Ajax.
What a good leader does is not create a zero sum game like Agamemnon, but a culture where everyone on the team is both valuable and valued, and if they’re not, well they shouldn’t be on the team in the first place.
Real leadership requires empathy. But it also requires discipline.
[PS. In a wonderful lecture at Hillsdale College, the historian Victor Davis Hansononce described General George S. Patton – a supremely gifted soldier with a rather roller-coaster career- as “The American Ajax.” An apt description.]
