Thersites: Anti-War Agitator
Thersites might be easily overlooked in the Iliad. In Book 2 he is described as brutish and ugly. [1] But he is a man of action. He stands up to Agamemnon and the other leaders of the Greeks, encouraging his fellow soldiers to stop throwing away their lives for the commanders and some rich man’s wife. His act of rebellion was gloriously retold in an article entitled ‘Homer and The Soapbox’, printed in the socialist US magazine The Masses (Jan. 1914). [2]
The article’s author “F.D.” (presumably Floyd Dell, pictured above – far right) tells that Thersites was “the first antimilitarist agitator whose name has come down to us”. In a time of increasing tension before the onset of war in Europe, Dell’s is an early voice calling out the exploitatory nature of war. Dell casts Thersites as the original “Marxist” conscientious objector, centuries ahead of his next contender Maximilianus.
Dell sets Thersites’ actions into his own modern political context by referring to ‘strikes’ and the ‘soap box’. He speaks at length of the kind of ‘mind-control’ (fetishism and reification) that capitalist education and ‘norms’ have over the proletariat, and also the act of seizing the means of production – in this case, the soldiers’ labour – to create change. [3]
But it doesn’t work. While he rouses attention from the men, Thersites is ignored by his ‘superiors’, then beaten and then does not speak up again. But why doesn’t he say something? The men seemed on the verge of something – if he could just get them away from the leaders, from Odysseus, who coaxed them round, perhaps he’d be able to make a change?
Dell’s article provides us with the common answer: because he was hungry. Because the capitalist system quashes uprisings for breakfast by the sheer control it has, and he cannot revolt alone again because, if he does, he fundamentally cannot survive. An uprising requires organisation and strength in numbers.
Thersites is used in this article to demonstrate the futility of revolution in the face of such strong opposition. [4] Dell presents an ancient mythical instance of futile revolutionary practice, that ultimately illustrates the difficulties that the Left faced in 1914, as sabres rattled on the Continent. He articulates that struggle through the figure of Thersites.
Another example of the US leftist use of Thersites comes with Hallie Flanagan’s Trojan Incident, written by Philip H Davis and performed by the Federal Theatre Project in 1938. [5] The play was written as an adaptation of Euripides’ Trojan Women, produced as if it were a message that stands outside of the bounds of history. The message? That war is ultimately motivated by the financial gain of the ruling-classes and reduces the regular man to cannon fodder – or, as Odysseus explains in the play, “We wanted war, not Helen. We wanted the Dardanelles, Menelaus. These straits have made Troy rich, and they are going to make us rich, too.”
At the beginning of the play, when the above motivations are exposed, Odysseus, Menelaus, and Agamemnon, the commanders of the war effort, are talking in their tent about the progress of the war, and our man Thersites comes up. He is said to be making dissident speeches, to be telling the men that they are being cheated by their generals for profit – and then the man himself comes in. He points out Agamemnon’s monetary gain from the war, the men’s tiredness of his orders, and then, in ringing prose that any revolutionary would be proud of, he presents the power of the Many against the Few:
“You hear my men out there – ten thousand strong. Well, soon you will hear a sound that has not been heard here for nine years – the rumble of ships going down the skids. And when you hear that you will know that we mean what we say.”
He goes on:
“All we are to you is so many bodies to heap up to the glory of Greece. In the name of a whore that no decent man would allow under his roof. … We have pulled down cities at your orders. We have murdered and plundered, we have died and rotted for you. But your men will not always be blind.”
The words are snappish, powerful, and they point out a key concept of Communist thought, expounded in much leftist literature of the 20th century: the power of the masses. [6] Thersites is, in many senses, as he is in Dell’s Masses article – the first anti-militarist agitator, and, because of the play’s ‘antichronistic’ staging, the quintessentially revolutionary voice.
As in Dell’s article, Thersites must be silenced. But Davis makes this silencing more dramatic. Thersites is explicitly spirited away by Talthybius, Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus’ lackey – which again shows the danger of speaking out against injustice in a capitalist society, but this time, with a hint of hope. When he reveals that he has killed Thersites, Talthybius says:
“I killed Thersites by Agamemnon’s order and by his order I will bring this priestess to him. His plans are no concern of mine. But I think we have heard words today that no king will be able to silence.”
In this moment the long legacy of Thersites is established. He has set in motion a change, built upon a new consciousness of the injustice of the (proto-)capitalist system. Thersites is a symbol of the conscious proletariat, freed from the shackles of capitalist ideology; Davis anticipates, as did so many, the apparently inevitable revolutionary advent of socialism.
For both Dell and Davis, Thersites is an ancient revolutionary. The difference is that, while Dell seems rather glum about the prospects of this revolutionary, when he has been silenced by the crafty Odysseus with a thump to the head, Davis seems confident that, even if the man himself has been disposed of by capitalist overlords, the revolution will continue. Thersites sows the seeds, provides the model – and the audiences of these works are expected to continue his legacy.
This post was written by Anna Coopey
Notes:
[1] Homer (trans. Richard Lattimore) (2011): The Iliad (pub. University of Chicago Press).
[2] F.D. ‘Homer and The Soapbox’ from The Masses (Page 11) (pub. January 1st 1914).
[3] For good reflection on and explanation of Marxist theory, see Schecter, Darrow (2007): The History of the Left from Marx to the Present: Theoretical Perspectives (pub. Bloomsbury Academic).
[4] For other left-wing receptions of Thersites in both theatre and modern Socialist politics, see the following:
Old Vic Illuminates ‘Troilus and Cressida’ from The Daily Worker (Page 6) (pub. December 31st, 1956).
Article on Homer Stirs Discussion from The Sunday Worker (Page 9) (pub. June 28th, 1953).
A People’s History of Heckling from Weekly Worker (pub. December 4th, 2014).
[5] Tamiris, Helen (2009): Trojan Incident: Play Script – http://mars.gmu.edu/xmlui/handle/1920/3595 (accessed 20-10-2021, 22:22).
[6] cf. Koestler, Arthur (1939): The Gladiators (Vintage Classics), pp. 95-96.
*Featured Image: ‘New York Courthouse, May 1918 – Eastman, Young, Eastman, Hillquit, Rogers, Dell.’ —Wikimedia
