Table Comparing Homer's Portraits of Three Leaders in the Iliad

Achilles and Odysseus Today:
What Homer Can Tell Us About Military Leadership

By Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D., D.V.A.
Outpatient Clinic and Tufts Dept. of Psychiatry, Boston, MA

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Table Comparing Homer's Portraits of Three Leaders in the Iliad

	Achilles	Odyssseus	Agamemnon
Physical courage	Personally courageous and skillful in a fight	Personally courageous and skillful in a fight	Personally courageous and skillful in a fight
Record of achievement/failure	Commander of maneuver force; has taken 12 cities by sea and 11 by land; most admired fighter and troop commander	Architect of victory; most admired staff and reconnaissance-intelligence officer; 100% casualties in his own contingent (no one else makes it home)	“Pyrrhic” victory as supreme commander after 10 years with calamitous losses; failure as commander of static force; logistical failure
Moral courage	Has moral courage	Agamemnon yes-man	Never takes responsibility
Relationship to troops/subordinates	Care (reputation as healer, initiative to end plague); credibility; charisma; lavish generosity	Lies to his troops; doesn’t trust anyone but himself to do things right; takes troops into needless danger for personal gain; protects himself but no effort to protect them; loses control of his troops	Contemptuous of what his troops value as “what’s right” (thémis); lies to his troops; demands theatrical demonstrations of troops’ loyalty to him
Communicative style	Blunt; truthful; ungrammatical and coarse when angry; tactless; what you see is what you get; speaks same to everyone	Eloquent flatterer; brilliant story-teller and talker; tactful; supple adaptation of speech to audience; fast and loose with the truth; slippery; tricky; what’s left out?	Bullying, alternating with self-pitying sentimentality
Emotional style	Passionate; energetic; shows emotions; given to self-righteousness and perfectionism	Driven; always looking for an angle; habitually conceals emotions	Vain and egotistical; self-indulgent; emotion of the moment defines what is real for him
Main motivational tools	Loyalty; others not want to upset him; leads by example	Ridicule and physical control; eloquent persuasion	Shames and humiliates; maintains authority by fomenting conflict among subordinates
*Profile of his thumos* (his ideals, ambitions, attachments, along with the stability and energy of same)**	Idealistic: determined; passionate; energetic; idealistic; capacity for intense and wide other-regarding attachments; capacity for command	Ambitious; determined; capacity for intense but narrow attachments directly identified with self	Weak, inconsistent; driven by self-gratification

Secretary of the Navy’s Guest Lecture, February 23, 2000

(Posting date 28 August 2006)

Read about Dr. Shay.

HCS encourages readers to view other articles and releases in our permanent, extensive archives at the URL http://www.helleniccomserve.com/contents.html, especially the Classical World section with additional lectures delivered for the John C. Rouman Classical Lecture Series at the University of New Hampshire and other related materials.