36 Ancient Ideals
them / his skull warped to a point / sprouting clumps of scraggly,
woolly hair” (II, 251–255). The ugly man cannot participate in the
Greek quest for excellence: heroes are healthy and handsome.
Thersites is a cur, a castaway and an outsider. But as an outsider, he
can see in ways that the others cannot. Like Socrates, the most fa-
mous contender against common opinion, Thersites is ugly— pushed
from the midst of common life, such men observe from the edges.
Detachment is forced upon them. They are compelled to think, to
interpret what appears before them. Obliquely, strangely, in Ther-
sites Homer shadows forth the contemplative ideal.
Thersites must be dealt with, and Odysseus steps forward to do
it. He strikes the man across the shoulders with his marshal’s baton
and tells him that if he ever rails against the leaders again it will go
even worse for him. Odysseus will strip him nearly naked and beat
him like a dog, chasing him up and down the beach. The com-
mander draws the scene of Thersites’ future punishment with such
graphic élan that the men can all but see it. They envision the mis-
shapen soldier scuttling like a wounded crab along the beach and
they break into ferocious laughter. But Thersites has had his say, in
the fashion of Socrates, who is willing to pay to expose others to
his truth. He has spoken, in what will be the fashion of Marx, about
how the upper orders steal from the lower. No matter how brightly
the armor shines and how grandly the horse hair plumes wave, Ther-
sites (and Marx) proclaim that theft is still theft.
It does not matter much that Thersites sides with Achilles against
Agamemnon. What matters is that he challenges the heroic code.
He mocks it in the way that the alienated phi los o pher or the egali-
tarian economist might. Thersites is absurd to the men in the poem
and, presumably, to Homer. He is the negative inverse of all they
value, the heroic code’s version of the Self hood— ugly, common, and
cowardly.