Ambition and Pride in Troilus and Cressida

Ulysses watches Achilles withdraw from battle, lounging in his tent and mocking the Greek generals. He delivers a warning: “Take but degree away, untune that string, / And hark, what discord follows.” The image is perfect. When hierarchy collapses, when pride overrides order, chaos spreads like infection. Ulysses argues that without rank, without structure, the world descends into appetite, and appetite consumes everything. He is not wrong in his diagnosis of how systems break. But the play’s deeper irony is that Ulysses himself is proposing to break the very hierarchy he has just praised. To cure Achilles of pride, Ulysses recommends giving Ajax—a lesser warrior—public credit for fighting Hector. The cure for disorder is calculated deception. The play suggests that ambition and pride are not aberrations in an otherwise orderly world. They are the engine of that world.

Ajax embodies a particular kind of ambition: he wants to be praised, to be seen, to matter. When the Greeks begin celebrating him instead of Achilles, he swells with pride. He becomes almost unrecognizable—silent where he was loud, arrogant where he was plain. But Ajax’s newfound pride is hollow. He has not changed in strength or skill. He has only changed in status, and status is a fiction created by other people’s attention. Achilles, watching Ajax ascend, feels his own status slip. He withdraws further, which makes him less visible, which makes others care less about him. The more he tries to prove his superiority through absence, the more he proves his irrelevance. The play watches both men caught in the same trap: they need others’ admiration to know they exist, but that admiration is fickle and uncontrollable.

Hector offers a counterpoint to this cycle of ambition. He fights not because he wants glory but because honor demands it. Yet the play shows that his nobility is also a form of pride—pride in his own virtue, in his ability to be better than the chaos around him. He refuses to kill disarmed opponents. He shows mercy to Thersites, a man of no account, because Hector will not lower himself to fight those beneath him. But this pride in his own virtue leads him to disarm himself on the battlefield, and in doing so, he becomes vulnerable. His final stand is against Achilles, who has no such pride. Achilles surrounds Hector with mercenaries and kills him while he is unarmed. Ambition and pride in this play are not vices that corrupt good men. They are the only forces that move men to act at all. Without them, there is only stasis. With them, there is death.

The play’s final lesson about ambition is that it never rests. Troilus, having lost Cressida, declares his ambition is vengeance. He will pursue Diomedes across every battlefield, will never stop, will make it his life’s work to kill the man who cuckolded him. His ambition has simply shifted targets, but the hunger remains. The play suggests that ambition is not something men can choose to abandon. It is the breath they breathe. Those who claim to be above it—like Hector, like Troilus when he speaks of honor—are lying to themselves. Ambition is written into the play’s very structure. It drives the war, drives the lovers, drives the generals. And it will continue long after Troy falls, long after the characters are dead, as their names live on in legend, serving as proof that ambition never truly dies.