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Summary
In the Greek camp, the great general and king Agamemnon is conversing with his lieutenants and fellow kings. He asks why they seem so glum and downcast—for although their seven-year siege of Troy has met with little success so far, they should welcome the adversity that the long war represents. After all, it is only in difficult times that greatness can emerge. Nestor, the oldest of the Greek commanders, echoes Agamemnon’s argument, citing examples of how heroism emerges from hardship. Ulysses responds by expressing his respect for what they have said, but he points out that the Greek army is facing a crisis not because of the duration of the war, but because of a breakdown in authority within the Greek camp. Instead of being united, they are divided into factions—and at the root of this crisis is the greatest of the Greek warriors, Achilles, who refuses to fight and instead sits in his tent while his friend (and lover) Patroclus makes fun of the Greek commanders. Others, like Ajax and his foul-mouthed slave, Thersites, follow this example, and so the entire army is corrupted.
The others agree that this is a great problem, and as they discuss what is to be done, Aeneas appears under a flag of truce, bringing a challenge from Hector. The Trojan prince offers to fight any Greek lord in single combat, with the honor of their respective wives being what’s at stake. The Greeks agree to find a champion and offer Aeneas hospitality. As Aeneas is led away, Ulysses tells Nestor that this challenge is truly directed at Achilles, since only Achilles could match the great Hector in battle. But to have Achilles fight Hector would be dangerous, because if Achilles lost, it would dishearten the entire army. Therefore, Ulysses suggests, they should contrive a lottery that will seem random, but which will be rigged to ensure that Ajax fights Hector. Even if Ajax loses, they can still claim that Achilles would have won in his place. At the same time, by choosing Ajax as their champion, they will infuriate Achilles and perhaps goad him into rejoining the war along with all his soldiers. Nestor, impressed with Ulysses’s intelligence, agrees to the plan.
Analysis
Having established the play’s personal drama in the first scenes with Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare now turns to the political drama, which is dominated by the figure of Ulysses. In classical Greek tradition, Ulysses, the king of Ithaca, is the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. He is also credited with devising the Trojan Horse ruse that enables the Greeks finally to take Troy. In every source, he is the wisest and most cunning of the Greeks. Shakespeare follows this tradition, making his Ulysses a clever politician who easily manipulates the stubborn, foolish warriors around him, especially the play’s two great thugs: Ajax and Achilles.
Ulysses is also a political philosopher. In this scene, he delivers one of the most famous political speeches in all of Shakespeare. Diagnosing the ills of the Greek army, he traces it all to a neglect of the importance of “degree,” which, he declares, is the glue that holds society together. He insists that if people do not “observe degree, priority, and place” (1.3.90), then everyone will be tempted to accumulate power for themselves. The result is that everyone will transform into “an universal wolf” (1.3.15), with society itself becoming “an universal prey” (127). In other words, when the respect for authority disappears, anarchy results. The speech is a perfect encapsulation of conservative politics, and it also touches on themes that Shakespeare develops in tragedies like Macbeth and King Lear, where the death or failure of a monarch results in the triumph of evil. Macbeth in Macbeth, and Goneril, Regan, and Edmund in King Lear, are perfect examples of the triumph of Ulysses’s “universal wolf” in the human heart.
The other Greek kings, including Agamemnon, are strictly second-rate compared with Ulysses, and so it is appropriate that in this scene, as throughout the play, they follow his lead. Achilles has not yet appeared, but the conversation between the kings serves to introduce him to us. Ulysses calls him “the great Achilles” (1.3.146), but the long account of how he and Patroclus sit around mocking the Greek commanders instead of fighting immediately undermines that description. In the Iliad, Homer gives Achilles a reason for sitting out of the fight: he is upset because Agamemnon has taken a slave girl from him. Perhaps Shakespeare assumed that his audience would know the story, and so he does not bother repeating it. In Troilus and Cressida, however, Achilles is never given a real motive for his refusal to fight, and the absence of a motive makes him appear that much more ridiculous. Despite being Homer’s hero, in Shakespeare’s play he becomes an unpleasant, even villainous, figure.
