THIS DOCUMENT IS MEANT TO BE A CRIB-SHEET WHICH WE CAN USE TO REMIND OURSELVES OF THE BASIC IDEAS WHICH STUURMAN BRINGS UP IN HIS ARTICLE. IT CONSISTS OF DIRECT QUOTATION FROM 'The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origins of  the Idea of Equality,' by Siep Stuurman, found in the Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2, 2004, 171 ff.
MY COMMENTS ARE IN ALL-CAPS. I HAVE ALSO OCCASIONALLY BOLD-FACED CERTAIN WORDS. I HAVE ALSO OCCASIONALLY PROVIDED SYNTACTICALLY NECESSARY WORDS IN [] SQUARE BRACKETS. I HAVE ALSO DONE SOME MINOR REARRANGING.

PLEASE READ THE ARTICLE IN FULL FOR MORE DETAIL AND NUANCE.

JB

PLOT SUMMARY

a few elementary facts: ... The Iliad is not a narrative of the Trojan War; it covers only some fifty days of the final phase of a ten-year siege. Its main subject matter is the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. It all begins with Agamemnon's blunt refusal to return the daughter of Chryses, a priest of Apollo, despite the latter's offer of a generous ransom. Agamemnon's insults to his priest anger the god, who punishes the Greek army with an epidemic, killing many men. The Greeks then consult a seer, who declares that the wrath of Apollo can only be placated by returning Chryses's daughter. Only then does Agamemnon reluctantly agree to surrender the girl, but he immediately demands a new prize in return and threatens to take it by force if it is not freely given to him. Finally he takes away Achilles's prize, the gorgeous Trojan girl Briseïs. To Achilles this is an outrageous affront to his honor and status as the most valiant fighter among the Greeks. He accuses Agamemnon of a trans-gression of the heroic code. Instead of recognizing Achilles as his peer (homoion) he has "dishonored" him.5 Achilles finally declares that he will not take part in the fighting until Agamemnon makes amends.

The [Thersites] story occurs in book II of the Iliad. The Greeks have besieged Troy for nine years and still no end is in sight. The conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon has greatly reduced the likelihood of a Greek victory, and the army is in a sour mood. Zeus then sends Agamemnon a false dream, prophesying that he will take Troy if he attacks right now. In council with the other leaders Agamemnon decides to test the army's fighting spirit first. He is going to urge them to board their ships and go home. Then the leaders must try to restrain the men. If that works, the army will be ready for the fight. The outcome of the assembly of the army will decide the fate of the war.

The army is summoned, and order is imposed. "With difficulty were the men seated and kept in their places, ceasing from the clamor."9 Agamemnon then (falsely) suggests that the war has lasted too long. Zeus appears not to favor a Greek victory, and it is better to return home. The assembly, Homer writes, is "stirred like the long waves of the Icarian sea" and starts to move towards the ships. Agamemnon's "test" is on the verge of turning into something dangerously close to a wholesale mutiny. It is Odysseus who saves the situation. Admonished by the goddess Athena, he takes the scepter from Agamemnon and restrains the fleeing multitude. To "kings" and other "men of note" he speaks gently, playing on their sense of honor and shame, but the men "of the people" (demou) he hits with his staff, rebuking them severely: "Sit still man, and listen to the words of others who are better men than you."10

Odysseus speedily imposes silence and obedience. Only one man fails to heed his counsel. This is Thersites, who is introduced as a man "of measureless speech." He is portrayed as an ugly and deformed man, whose raving and ranting is quickly silenced by Odysseus, who strikes him on the back with his staff;  [End Page 174]  and, as Homer relates, "Thersites cowered down" and "fear came on him and, stung by pain, he wiped a tear away with a helpless look." But the Greeks "broke into merry laughter at him." All of the soldiers approve of Odysseus's silencing of the quarrelsome upstart. The narrative of Thersites is concluded—order is restored, in the army as well as in the text.


INTRODUCTION

[In Greece] shared reflection about the human condition made possible by writing emerged in societies where distinctions between ruler and ruled, man and woman, master and slave, lord and commoner, and finally native and foreigner constituted the "deep normality" of social life. ...  Powerful discourses of inequality told everyone what their station in life was and instructed them to speak and behave accordingly.

In this essay I seek to retrieve ... the historical moment when equality became thinkable in a setting in which the politicized demos had not yet appeared on the horizon. [End Page 171]

Equality was not an empirical idea.2 Quite the contrary, the numbing repetition of the daily routines of inequality would seem to make it almost unthinkable.

simple conjecture: ... Notions of equality do not arise out of the blue. They usually take the form of a critique of prevailing ideas about the superiority of some people above others. In that sense every discourse of equality is grafted upon some previously articulated discourse of inequality. When somebody asserts that "we" are in some relevant sense "like them," the very utterance of the claim implies a questioning of the given relationship between "us" and "them."

assumption: ... civilizations are, among other things, defined by the texts on which they confer canonical status... the master narratives and exemplary stories later authors draw upon to formulate authoritative interpretations. ... The Homeric epics, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur'an, and the Analects of Confucius are outstanding examples of such canonical texts.

Homeric Equality?

Alasdair MacIntyre asserts that the Homeric concepts of goodness and virtue refer to aristocratic standards of behavior, so that the common people have no moral standing at  [End Page 172]  all.4

[that is] too narrow. ... The Thersites scene, in which a commoner openly criticizes Agamemnon, is precisely grafted upon a crisis in the Greek army engendered by the tensions in the aristocratic code. By giving Thersites a voice Homer's moral imagination transcends the heroic code.

By giving a commoner a fairly good speech Homer seems to indicate that the ordinary warriors count for something, too.

As supreme commander Agamemnon should have put the common interest above his selfish egotism, as the other leaders had urged him to do.  [End Page 173]

Considered politically the Iliad is thus a story of failed leadership and infighting among the elite.7 As we know from other episodes in history, these are precisely the circumstances that frequently occasion criticisms of aristocratic and kingly authority and the emergence of popular dissent.

Homer places Thersites's speech at just such a critical juncture, when the leadership is divided and the dispirited army is on the verge of a revolt.

[WHAT THERSITES SAYS:]
"Shouting loudly," Homer recounts, "he reviled Aga-memnon":
 Son of Atreus, what are you unhappy about this time, or what do you lack? Your huts are filled with bronze, and there are many women in your huts, chosen spoils that we Achaeans give you first of all, whenever we take a city. Or do you still want gold also, which one of the horse-taming Trojans will bring you out of Ilios as a ransom for his son, whom I perhaps have bound and led away or some other of the Achaeans? Or is it some young girl for you to know in love, whom you will keep apart for yourself? It is not right for one who is their leader to bring the sons of the Achaeans harm. Soft fools! Base things of shame, you women of Achaea, men no more, homeward let us go with our ships, and leave this fellow here in the land of Troy to digest his prizes, so that he may learn whether we, too, aid him in any way or not.11

Thersites is clearly speaking to the rank and file.  [End Page 175]

Thersites highlights the indispensible role of the ordinary soldiers in the conduct of the war,
That Thersites is not really supporting Achilles is also apparent from the information Homer provides about him. He "was in the habit of reviling" the leaders, notably Achilles and Odysseus.14 Thersites's outburst against Agamemnon is thus no isolated incident but part of a "career" of criticism. Finally, Thersites has a good point.

Four aspects of the Thersites episode strongly suggest a proto-egalitarian reading:

1. Thersites's point about the division of the plunder,
2. his call to leave Agamemnon to his own devices,
3. the fact that he speaks up at all, and
4. the reaction of the mass of the army.

Giving each man his due, the principle Aristotle would later define as "distributive justice," is the foundation of the aristocratic code of reciprocity. Underlying it are basic notions of fairness and equality within the restricted company of the aristocracy

 Suggesting that commoners might also deserve a portion in accordance with their merit, Thersites is exploiting the ambiguity of the rules governing the distribution of plunder.

The second proto-egalitarian point: Thersites...is drawing on the aristocratic code. One of its main rules was that it is unworthy and shameful to shirk and slack. ...The "lesser" men, he suggests, not only have to submit to the "greater," but the latter also depend on the former.

Third, there is the issue of voice. By the very act of speaking up, Thersites claims a voice for the commoners.

Finally, the reaction of the men: ... The soldiers surely have a good laugh at his expense, but they are also, Homer says, "troubled at heart." ... the soldiers feel at least some affinity with Thersites's call to go home ... it is by no means clear that they are willing to resume the fight. ... the crisis was a real one.

 Early Readings of Thersites: Gladstone and Wilamowitz

British liberal statesman William Gladstone and the German conservative classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.

Besides participating in theological disputes, governing Britain, and saving prostitutes at night Gladstone found the time to study Homer extensively. In Gladstone we encounter a cautious democratic reading of the evidence. ...
He is not sympathetic to Thersites, far from it, but he takes care to observe that Thersites's behavior and the army's reaction to it demonstrate that in Homeric society "freedom of debate was a thing in principle at least known and familiar." In his discussion of the role of the assembly Gladstone reminds his readers of the important role of popular applause in the French Revolution, then only two generations back.

 [End Page 178]

Let us now look at the great nineteenth-century German classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.
... his judgment of Thersites is far more dismissive than Gladstone's. According to Wilamowitz, the purpose of the episode is to "turn around" the assembly from its cowardly impulse to flee homeward to its proper fighting spirit.

Wilamowitz depicts Thersites as a homesick coward. ... his speech [as] illogical and silly, the performance of a stupidly proud (dummstolze) plebeian who "prostitutes himself" in exposing the impotence of the commoners for all the world to see. Even so, Wilamowitz acknowledges that Thersites is the spokesman of "a popular mood that is fed up with toiling for the sake of Agamemnon," but he typifies it as "homesickness,"  [End Page 179]  an apolitical and "unmanly" emotion. Wilamowitz further observes that the assembly remains ineffectual. In Homeric society, he argues, it cannot be otherwise, but the poet has projected the political life of his own time, the Ionian towns in which the power of the people is limited yet real, onto the subject of his story. Against that background the inglorious end of Thersites goes without saying, for "it is a typical eternal truth that the people cheer when the windbag who has flattered them receives a good trashing."27

Recent Interpretations of the Thersites Episode

5 different readings :

1. Homer inserted the Thersites episode to affirm the aristocratic ideology. In his classic study of Greek values Arthur Adkins asserts that "not even Thersites" denies the validity of Homer's "aristocratic scale of values." He is thus unable to transcend the aristocratic ethos, and, not being a man of any standing, his words are not really consequential.29 None of these authors attach much importance  [End Page 180]  to Thersites's speech; what he has to say is, after all, irrelevant. The real point of the episode is the speedy imposition of order by Odysseus.
2. acknowledge Homer's aristocratic sympathies, but regards Thersites as a proto-democratic figure. ..."a remote glimmer of proper egalitarianism." depicting Thersites as a democratic voice that is somehow "out of place"
3. highlights Thersites's perfect timing. The disastrous consequences of Aga-memnon's initial address to the warriors are of no concern to him; it is only when Odysseus begins to stem the tide that he takes the floor. Thersites, Seibel contends, has seen through the trick of testing the army and his speech is a reasoned reply to it. She thinks Homer is imagining a real contest between two "demagogues," Thersites and Odysseus, over the control of the assembly. Odysseus emerges victorious, but he outplays Thersites not by persuasion alone but principally by threats and violence.35 On this reading Thersites stands for an interruption of the aristocratic consensus, showing that Homer is aware of an alternative to the aristocratic ideology.
4. Homer's subtle representation of the code demonstrates that he expects his audience to reflect on the code, not to accept it unthinkingly. [End Page 181]  The Iliad is not a manual for would-be aristocrats but a narrative about people who are in a very real sense entrapped in the code.
5. focuses on the explosion of laughter that ends the Thersites scene. It explains the episode as a cathartic experience. W. G. Thalmann depicts Thersites as "a marginal, comic figure" which, "through his defiance and the reaction it provokes, involuntarily performs a healing function for his society." Thersites "is the victim of the comic process," a scapegoat on which the army can unload the unbearable tension accumulated over the long years of war.
   

aspects of Thersites's person and behavior upon which everyone agrees:
    1      Thersites has certain physical deformities: a pointed head, almost no hairs, hanging shoulders, and he is bandylegged.
    2      His name is a "speaking name." Thersites is derived from thersos or tharsos (in Aeolean). It can be taken to signify "effrontery" or "insolence," but also "boldness" or "courage."44
    3      He is portrayed as a man of low social standing. He has no patronym and no place of origin. Thersites is, literally, the man from nowhere.45
    4      The fact that he addresses the assembly without holding the ritual speaker's scepter casts doubt on the legitimacy of his intervention.
    5      Homer tells us that Thersites's criticism of Agamemnon is no isolated episode. Thersites, he relates, was in the habit of reviling the aristocrats, especially Achilles and Odysseus, two of the major leaders in the Greek army.
    6      He is introduced by Homer as a chatterbox whose words are "measure-less," and Odysseus dismisses him as akritomuthos, uttering words that make no sense.
    7      The speech Homer has him pronounce, however, is generally regarded as a polished piece of crafty rhetoric. Paradoxically, Odysseus calls him "ligus ... agorètès,"46 "a clear-voiced speaker in the assembly," in the same line where he dismisses him as akritomuthos.  [End Page 183]
    8      In the showdown following Thersites's intervention Odysseus does not actually refute his arguments but intimidates him and finally subdues him by physical violence.
    9      Thersites himself is well aware of the weakness of his position and the faint-heartedness of the multitude. There is a bitter irony in his desperate appeal to his fellow-warriors.
    10      After Thersites is silenced it still takes two persuasive speeches by Odysseus and Nestor to convince the troops that the war must go on.

It follows that a valid interpretation of the Thersites episode must ... account for the above ten features of the story, and ... enable us to explain the content and thrust of his speech in terms of the available languages of Homer's society.

[Thersites is] the allegorical representation of a cultural stereotype. .... a possible, thinkable, dreaded, or dreamed political crisis.  [End Page 184]
 
Homer's ability to imagine Thersites's critical position is highly significant. While he generally subscribes to the aristocratic worldview, the Thersites episode shows that, as an author, he is not imprisoned within it and that he is aware of the brittleness of aristocratic rule.47

According to Latacz this story, our Iliad, refers to the tensions and anxieties of the eighth century, a period of rapid social, political, and cultural change. It is about the self-image of an aristocracy plagued by internal strife and anxiety about traditional values and new challenges.

Homer's world is organized in poleis, not in family clans.51 According to Raaflaub, the important role of both the restricted council of the basileis and the popular assembly of the entire army point to the salience and possible competition of different modes of collective decision-making. The aristocratic leaders, Raaflaab states, "form a fiercely competitive group of equals among  [End Page 185]  whom the paramount basileus holds an inherited, though precarious, position of preeminence as primus inter pares."52

The politics of the Iliad, then, displays the first glimmerings of the Herodotean scheme of the one, the few, and the many which provides the framework for all subsequent Greek theorizing about political regimes.

The "king" and the "aristocrats" share the leadership, but at each critical juncture in the story the "people" (the assembly) plays a role.53 ... A vote is never taken: this shows the power of the leaders, but it may also be dangerous, for there is no accepted procedure to resolve serious disagreement within the leadership.55

In such circumstances an aristocracy, in particular a loosely-knit aristocracy of competitive warriors, faces two dangers: abuse of power by the chief basileus, and popular revolt. The plot of the Iliad mainly turns on the first danger: Agamemnon exemplifies the risk that the chief king can endanger the entire community, becoming a "people-devouring king" as Achilles puts it.56

the problem of aristocratic identity is Homer's primary concern. It follows that we cannot expect sympathy for Thersites from him. What Homer depicts in the allegorical figure of Thersites is not something he likes but something he and his audience fear

More inclusive notions of an equality of "all men" are also found in Homer. In the Iliad they are enshrined in a general notion of reciprocity and "civilized" behavior shared by the Greeks and the Trojans. Near-universalist notions of equality are more explicit in the Odyssey.

What we find in Homer is a strong notion of aristocratic equality juxtaposed to a weak notion of the equality of all free males. Thersites stands for the historical moment in which [a] more egalitarian outcome becomes thinkable.

How does equality become thinkable?
we can generalize the "Homeric" model to cover other historical cases.  [End Page 187]

the notion of fairness and equality within an elite is much older than Homer. It is already found in Hammurabi's Babylonian law code. If a lord destroys the eye of another lord, his eye shall be destroyed; but if he destroys the eye of a commoner he gets away with a fine.61 A rule of strictly equal retribution in the aristocracy is juxtaposed to a merely monetary compensation for damage inflicted on a commoner. Non-aristocrats can take up this language and suggest its application to a larger, more inclusive community. Why should a commoner's eye be of lesser value than the eye of a lord, to remain with the Mesopotamian example?

The point that the principle of "giving each man his due" admits of different interpretations according to the social content given to it would later be made by Aristotle in a theoretical form. "All are agreed that justice in distributions must be based on desert of some sort, although they do not all mean the same sort of desert; democrats make the criterion free birth; those of oligarchical sympathies wealth, or in other cases [noble] birth; upholders of aristocracy make it virtue."62

consciousness of mutual dependence. The Iliadic Aiantes put it well. War is, indeed, "work for all"—and deadly peril for all, we might add. It is this common experience that accounts for the potential elasticity of the language of aristocratic equality. A fateful episode in the Odyssey conveys the same message. Aeolus has given Odysseus a bag in which all the dangerous storms are imprisoned. But Odysseus's companions, eager for treasure, want to see what is in it. Well, one of them says, surely Odysseus is carrying "beautiful treasure ... with him from the land of Troy ... while we, who have accomplished the same journey as he, are coming home empty-handed."63 The men are of course sadly mistaken about the contents of the bag, and the consequences are disastrous. Nonetheless, they have a point. Just like war, sea travel is a common enterprise fraught with mortal danger. The leaders are powerless without their men, and the men's fate depends on competent leadership. This creates a sense of mutual dependence. In such situations an  [End Page 188]  ordinary soldier or sailor can say: look here, we are in this together, so why don't we share the rewards in a more equitable manner. The language to make such claims is provided by the aristocrats themselves who contest one another's share with similar arguments.