Like the philosophers, they had the not very tactful habit of teaching others how to live. But unlike the philosophers, they did it in a more direct way, without intellectual intricacies, and sometimes quite violently. They taught the Myrmidons that everything important and essential takes place in one’s head—that is, in an imaginary world—and that this world is stronger than the visible world. They also explained to the Myrmidons how miserable they were. The measure of their misfortune was the fact that they did not realize it at all. The main cause of their misery was their incompetent, weak government. Ajax should be thrown out and democracy introduced.
The Myrmidons, however, were unanimously content with their life. Why, then, should they throw out their gentle king? They showed total lack of interest in democracy because with typical, naive sincerity, they admitted they didn’t know what it meant. It is possible, they said, the world tended in this direction, but why should they, the Myrmidons, be like the world instead of like themselves?
According to the holy principles of theory, revolutions are always carried out from “the bottom.” In completely exceptional cases it is possible to contrive them from the top. This is of course a deviation, and as such should be carefully passed over in silence. Once everything is arranged, one must quickly invent a genesis, background, and chronology according to the principles of science. The transporters started secret negotiations with Ajax. They highly praised his desires for reforms, but—he had to admit it himself—he hadn’t achieved much. To lead the Myrmidons out of their backwardness, dramatic methods had to be used. Bloodshed was necessary.
This word reappeared many times, in each conversation. Poor Ajax trembled all over, he grew pale, sometimes even wept. With all the gods as his witnesses, he swore nothing was as foreign to him as violence, and that he would never allow any harm to be done to the inhabitants of the island. They answered that during truly unpleasant events he would be removed behind a curtain. The king grew pale, whimpered, and softened.
It is difficult to pass in silence over an obvious question: Why did Ajax agree to these conversations? They became a source of psychological torture for him. He was a free man, he could simply show his uninvited guests to the door: that is, beyond the perimeter of the shadowy oak tree.
The simple explanation of this enigma can be found in a strange trait in the nature of men. Instead of shrugging their shoulders, they consider it their sacred duty to answer idiotic questions and arrogant provocations, becoming in this way easy prey for various madmen. The dividing line between an accidental situation and a relationship lasting an entire life is very fluid; married couples know about this. It is possible to avoid many unpleasant occurrences, even catastrophes, by summoning the aid of common sense. But this is an extremely rare spiritual virtue, particularly among thinking, delicate individuals. Almost everyone carries inside him a vague sense of guilt, and from this guilt our neighbor, if he is a bit clever, can concoct dangerous things. Ajax considered himself a weak ruler, and in addition one who did not sufficiently love his subjects. The transporters knew it well. This knowledge was enough to undermine Ajax’s psychological structure: metaphorically speaking, to conquer the fortress.
The transporters worked out a scenario and presented it to the king for his approval. It was simple (let us honor this subtlety). At a designated moment a kind of simulated coup would take place with all the appearances of being real. Ajax would be slightly wounded, and—this was planned beforehand—carried behind the curtains. A few Myrmidons would be accused of an attempt at regicide. During a public trial they would receive stiff punishment. At that moment the inhabitants of the island would naturally divide into supporters and adversaries of the coup; this would be the beginning of a productive antagonism. From then on affairs would proceed according to the laws of dialectics, from good forms to better and better forms, until in the end the butterfly of perfection would take flight from its gray cocoon.
Indeed it almost happened. It is the Myrmidons, one must sadly admit, who with their inexcusable stubbornness and dullness bear the historical blame for causing the butterfly’s death. Quite simply, none of those who were accused admitted their guilt. This sentence should be repeated several times, because it sounds absolutely fantastic. The gentle persuasions of the transporters, and their sophisticated tortures, came to nothing.
In their fierce stubbornness the Myrmidons said that to lift a stone, one first has to want to lift the stone (in other words, to kill a king one has to want to). Everyone knew that they loved their ruler, and what man of healthy mind would freely deprive himself, with his own free will, of the object of his love? They were not convinced by the argument that Ajax intended to sacrifice his life on the altar of a better future, because he had never talked about the topic. In fact nobody, not even a rabbit, wants to be killed. (Parenthetically, let us notice the primitive quality of the metaphors of the Myrmidons: a stone, a rabbit).
The accused were confirmed in their conviction that the king was no longer there. He had left for a better world; their resistance was useless, they were fighting for a shadow. But the Myrmidons, who knew the real value of shadow, defended themselves with the determination that comes from despair. Intellectually backward, they rejected without deeper reflection the argument that they did not want the murder subjectively, but objectively they did. This sophism, invented by semi-intellectuals with political inclinations, is older than it seems. In addition, the accused repeatedly asked their torturers how it was possible to sleep next to one’s wife (this was exactly their case) and at the same time plot something in a distant location. (The principle of the excluded middle, moral rather than logical, undermined or enlarged by polyvalent logic that luckily had not been invented.)
Bitterness, revulsion, and spite filled the transporters’ hearts to such an extent that they decided to end their mission and abandon the island. To leave behind at least a small trace of their visit, they killed all those who were accused, without exception. This was supposed to mean that the ax was buried, but they would return at the first call of history.
The Myrmidons celebrated the restoration of monarchy in an atmosphere of unusual enthusiasm. What is strange is that Ajax returned in glory. If it was possible, he was loved even more ardently than before the short invasion. He tried to explain and justify himself. No one wanted to listen to him.
His sensitive conscience did not leave him in peace. He seemed to look at his subjects sadly, because nobody blamed him for anything. For him, their trust was a reproach, their total devotion a burden. So he asked his heavenly father to call him away from this mystic island where goodness was natural, evil came always from outside, and nothing—absolutely nothing—was in between.
For the second time, Zeus took pity on his son. He nominated him for a managerial position in the Department of Justice of the afterlife.
In the heat of narration we have forgotten to mention that Ajax was married twice and from each marriage had a son. Both boys, or rather men, were exceptionally handsome. It is difficult to say anything about their other merits. Only later did it turn out that they were unscrupulous, a trait in individuals who try to compensate for inborn dullness with an excess of ambition.
Here we suspend our tale, because just at this moment Clio enters the holy grove of myth: a big girl, tall, clumsy, strong as a horse, and coarse beyond words—the goddess of usurpers, repeating her worn-out clichés.
THIS HORRIBLE THERSITES
To Véronique Behrens
The armies took their seats1, marshaled in rows and according to ranks. But one man, Thersites, talked on endlessly, full of contention and insults. He baited the kings and looked hard—but in vain—for occasions to sow discord between them, provoking the Achaeans in every possible way and making them burst out in laughter.
ILIAD
A COUNCIL OF THE Hellenic chieftains is taking place, disturbed by a strange individual named Thersites. He appears only once in the Iliad. In the tumult of battles and quarrels o
f commanders, his name disappears like a pin in a haystack.
Who was Thersites? According to Homer he was generally despised and had the appearance of a caricature—the ugliest warrior who came to Troy. Lame, with a caved-in chest, a skull warped to a point and covered by scraggly hair. The portrait of a real egghead. His physical appearance was a reflection of his spiritual qualities; in the poem Thersites is a coward, quarrelsome, and a constant grumbler.
Probing more deeply into the poem, we discover in the episode a wealth of meanings.
There are no background characters in the Iliad. The work is a gigantic bas-relief in which there is room only for the heroes fighting against the background of a great plain. If names appear other than those of Achilles, Agamemnon, Diomedes, they are names of those who perished, about whom we know only that they lost their lives at Troy. So why did Homer make an exception for a man with no significance?
The first answer would be that he did it for reasons of composition. Into a stifling atmosphere of blood and violence, he wanted to introduce a comic moment, a divertissement, something to provide a moment of respite and pure laughter. But the poem develops inexorably along a straight line toward destiny. It has no detours from the action, comic episodes, or accidental events.
The name Thersites probably comes from a word meaning “arrogant,” and this explains his personality. But Homer did not invent the character of Thersites; according to others the name means “brave” and “courageous.” It could therefore be a name that carries a comic meaning, in contrast to Thersites’ real personality. It is as if the name “Švejk” meant “fearless” in Czech.
Consequently one should not look for the answer to this riddle in onomastics.
Let us return to the poem.
What is Thersites doing in the Iliad? He interrupts the council of commanders. He criticizes Agamemnon, asserting that he is using the war to enrich himself, to accumulate conquered bronze and collect pretty female slaves. “Or still more gold are you wanting? More ransom a son / of the stallion-breaking Trojans might just fetch from Troy? / Though I or another Achean drags him back in chains?2”
So we are not dealing here with some general grumbling of Thersites, but a completely concrete, material cause for dissent. Does the unjust division of spoils—the captive Briseis taken by Agamemnon—determine the axis of the poem?
Thersites dares to bring charges against the commander not only on his own behalf but on behalf of those who are silent. Therefore he seems to be a voice for the injured.
But who, really, was Thersites? In Homer his social rank is not clear. If he was an ordinary camp follower, he would not have been admitted to the councils of commanders. His name does not appear on the list of ships, so he was not a commander himself. This much we can deduce directly from Homer.
As we said, the author of the Iliad did not invent Thersites’ name; in other myths he is nothing less than a king of Aetolia3, son of Agrios and cousin of Diomedes, a hero of the Trojan War and one of the few who—like Nestor—returned from Troy alive.
Other myths tell that Thersites took part in a hunt for a Caledonian boar that was ravaging the fields of Meleander. A quarrel broke out during the hunt, and Thersites was thrown from a cliff. Thus his repulsive lameness was not inborn but acquired in a fight. Mythology made Thersites a cripple. Indeed he did not deserve the degrading thrashing given by Odysseus in front of everybody in the Iliad. Precisely by Odysseus, who was not especially distinguished by bravery, who pretended to be a madman plowing the ocean sand in order to avoid taking part in the expedition to Troy.
How did Thersites come to an end? Homer doesn’t mention it. According to other legends, the direct cause of death was a quarrel—again a quarrel—with Achilles.
We know that the Amazons, under the command of the beautiful queen Penthesilea, took part in the last phase of the combat on the side of Ilium. In these battles Achilles mortally wounded Penthesilea—a favorite motif of many painters4 of vases. A more brutal version of the myth says that Achilles fell in love with Penthesilea’s dead body and committed, on the spot, an act of necrophilia. This, on the other hand, seems to be a favorite theme of modernist dramas about love and death.
Thersites rightly ridiculed Achilles for this repulsive action, and the hero, lacking any arguments to defend himself, knocked out all of Thersites’ teeth and sent his soul to Erebus.
So much for the myths.
Today we can look differently at Thersites, without Homer’s consent. Who was he? A representative of the vanquished, perhaps a Minoan prince stripped of power by the Achaeans.
His only weapon was abuse, the rebellion of the helpless—without hope but precisely because of that, deserving admiration and respect.
CLEOMEDES
ASTIPALEA.
A small island of the Sporades Archipelago southeast of the Peloponnesus—strictly speaking it is two islands connected by a narrow, wet isthmus. Less than a hundred square kilometers of sand, rocks, and scanty vegetation.
What can be said about this place on the earth? Not much, almost nothing. And it is this that seems completely exceptional in a country populated beyond measure with true and legendary history, a country where every cave, forest, spring, and mountain repeats the echo of the gods.
With sadness it must be stated this island was not a cradle of the arts and wisdom, a homeland for explorers of stars, poets, able potters, or even a dynasty of rulers whose picturesque crimes could be the subject of a tragedy. None of its men won fame on the fields of great battles, none of its women were visited by Zeus to become mothers of unpredictable heroes.
Everything here was ordinary, commonplace, flat. Patient sheep trod the summit of the highest elevation called a mountain due to patriotic impulse. The capital: a gathering of pitiful white houses, a noisy agora, a few squat, graceless temples. That was all. Even catastrophes worthy of note, epidemics and earthquakes bypassed the island.
The destiny of Astipalea1 was, thus, mediocrity. One had to be reconciled to this. Life in the shadow, a quiet recess the storms of history don’t reach, all of that has its charm. But although we appreciate our own safety, we hold it against our ancestors if not one had the courage to take part in a dangerous expedition or perish on the field of a famous battle, in a word, if they failed to achieve anything worthy of song.
And so the inhabitants of Astipalea experienced a feeling of shame as they listened to the rhapsodes. Someone even had the mad notion of supplementing the famous catalogue of ships in the Iliad to include just one from Astipalea—or of appointing a youth from the island as driver for one of the heroes who struggled at Troy. One can’t deny these were modest ambitions. The philologists gently call them interpolations. But at the time we are writing about, the texts of both poems were definitively established, and an attempt to encroach on a past both sacred and fixed would have inevitably provoked jeering. No one in his right mind hesitates when confronted with the cruel choice, eternal ridicule or eternal repudiation.
An obstinate yearning, a collective will working in hiding, untiringly, the hope of many nameless generations that a day will come when the island is born a second time, if only for a moment—all this was fulfilled in a surprisingly simple way. In the family of a blacksmith, a boy was brought into the world and given the name Cleomedes. In this or a similar manner all great tales of humanity ought to begin.
Later the irresistible need for a miracle found prophetic signs and multiplied them: an old oak split on the day of Cleomedes’ birth, an eagle could be seen circling above the city. Others spoke of a high tidal wave, of fog assuming shapes of the Olympian gods, a rainbow, and also a strange light that came not from above but it seemed from the center of the earth, transforming this crumb of land into a pale morning star.
The young Cleomedes was meek, quiet, and shy. The gods sent him two gifts that rarely come in pairs and are therefore considered contradictory: beauty and strength. Beauty is a static trait and is inherent—like the beauty of a flower, an
ocean bay or a fair summer night. It is content with itself, sure of its own rights, and can ultimately dispense with confirmation, a contest or wreath. The beautiful lead a quiet life and are rarely entangled in dramatic adventures. With strength it is entirely different. Its essence is a challenge thrown to people and to the world. It manifests itself only in struggle, in receiving and administering blows, in a growing pyramid of deeds more and more unimaginable and murderous.
Allow us to interrupt chronology and note that several centuries after the events described here, an Alexandrian versifier slapped together a poem about the youth of Cleomedes the Athlete. Preserved fragments of this inept work can be found in poetry manuals as frightening models of disastrous versification—of stilted pathos and poverty of the imagination—because the author ascribed the deeds of other heroes in the past to his protagonist, ignoring the fact that Astipalea could be the setting of a satirical drama at most, but not of a tragedy requiring pathetic scenery.
After all, no one on this island had ever met a god face to face. The landscape was monotonous, without lions, giants, horses devouring people, monsters of the earth or the sea, tyrants, or even a cleft in the rocks leading to the kingdom of the dead.
Only a single report worthy of confidence says that during a local religious ceremony—a sculpture of marble was taking the place of an old wooden statue of Athena—Cleomedes walked at the head of the procession carrying the huge stone goddess as lightly as an olive branch.
It was decided to send the young man to Sparta, so he could concentrate on thorough studies under the eyes of experienced preceptors. This usually meant training the mind in philosophy and mathematics, as well as acquiring the ability to construct long, ornate sentences and intricate syllogisms. In keeping with his vocation, Cleomedes practiced horseback riding, driving chariots, perfecting himself in the art of throwing the discus and javelin, in running both naked and wearing armor, in the pentathlon, wrestling and boxing.
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