Ulysses stands at the intellectual and political center of the Greek camp, a figure whose eloquence and cunning make him far more dangerous than any warrior wielding a sword. His famous speech on degree—the hierarchy of order that holds the universe in balance—is magnificent rhetoric that masks a fundamentally cynical political maneuver. He deploys this philosophy of cosmic order not out of belief in it, but as a tool to manipulate Achilles back into battle. When the strategy requires undoing that very hierarchy, he does so without hesitation, revealing that his grand philosophy serves only his immediate tactical needs. Ulysses is the play’s most lucid voice on time’s cruelty and forgetting: Time, he tells Achilles, carries a wallet on his back where he puts alms for oblivion, and yesterday’s heroes are forgotten as quickly as the sun moves across the sky. Yet Ulysses himself uses this bitter knowledge as a weapon, reminding Achilles that his fame is slipping away even as he lounges in his tent.
What makes Ulysses peculiarly modern is his awareness that language—especially grand, elevated language—is almost always a lie or a distortion. He watches the events of the play with a kind of detached intelligence, narrating what he sees with precision but never allowing himself to be fooled by the same rhetoric he deploys. When he witnesses Cressida’s infidelity in Act 5, Scene 2, he serves as Troilus’s reluctant guide, a voice of reason trying to pull the young prince away from a scene of emotional devastation. He doesn’t judge Cressida harshly, though he sees clearly what is happening; instead, he understands her as a product of her circumstances, a woman in a hostile foreign camp using the only currency available to her. His silence at moments of emotional crisis speaks as loudly as his speeches: he knows that words will not help, and that truth, when it comes, must be received in solitude.
Ulysses is ultimately a portrait of the intellectual trapped in a world of appetite and power. His insights about hierarchy, time, and human nature are accurate and penetrating, yet they change nothing. The Greeks win their war not through his cunning but through Achilles’ brutal murder of an unarmed man. His manipulation of Achilles works only temporarily, and the greater machinery of war and lust—what Thersites calls “lechery” and “the argument”—grinds on indifferent to his philosophy. He survives the play intact and honored, but the audience is left with the uncomfortable sense that his survival is itself a kind of moral failure, the price of serving power without truly believing in anything except the necessity of serving it.
