Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores

And make a sop of all this solid globe;

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead.

Force should be right—or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey,

And last eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,

This chaos, when degree is suffocate,

Follows the choking.

And this neglection of degree it is

That by a pace goes backward in a purpose

It hath to climb. The general’s disdained

By him one step below; he, by the next;

That next, by him beneath. So every step,

Exampled by the first pace that is sick

Of his superior, grows to an envious fever

Of pale and bloodless emulation.

And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot,

Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length:

Troy in our weakness lives, not in her strength.

NESTOR

Most wisely hath Ulysses here discovered

The fever whereof all our power is sick.

AGAMEMNON

The nature of the sickness found, Ulysses,

What is the remedy?

ULYSSES

The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns

The sinew and the forehand of our host,

Having his ear full of his airy fame

Grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent

Lies mocking our designs. With him Patroclus

Upon a lazy bed the livelong day

Breaks scurrile jests

And, with ridiculous and awkward action

Which, slanderer, he ‘imitation’ calls,

He pageants us. Sometime, great Agamemnon,

Thy topless deputation he puts on,

And like a strutting player, whose conceit

Lies in his hamstring and doth think it rich

To hear the wooden dialogue and sound

’Twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage,

Such to-be-pitied and o‘er-wrested seeming

He acts thy greatness in. And when he speaks

’Tis like a chime a-mending, with terms unsquared

Which from the tongue of roaring Typhon dropped

Would seem hyperboles. At this fusty stuff

The large Achilles on his pressed bed lolling

From his deep chest laughs out a loud applause,

Cries ‘Excellent! ’Tis Agamemnon just.

Now play me Nestor, hem and stroke thy beard,

As he being dressed to some oration.’

That’s done as near as the extremest ends

Of parallels, as like as Vulcan and his wife.

Yet god Achilles still cries, ‘Excellent!

‘Tis Nestor right. Now play him me, Patroclus,

Arming to answer in a night alarm’.

And then forsooth the faint defects of age

Must be the scene of mirth: to cough and spit,

And with a palsy, fumbling on his gorget,

Shake in and out the rivet. And at this sport

Sir Valour dies, cries, ‘O enough, Patroclus!

Or give me ribs of steel. I shall split all

In pleasure of my spleen.’ And in this fashion

All our abilities, gifts, natures, shapes,

Severals and generals of grace exact,

Achievements, plots, orders, preventions,

Excitements to the field or speech for truce,

Success or loss, what is or is not, serves

As stuff for these two to make paradoxes.

NESTOR

And in the imitation of these twain

Who, as Ulysses says, opinion crowns

With an imperial voice, many are infect.

Ajax is grown self-willed and bears his head

In such a rein, in full as proud a place

As broad Achilles, and keeps his tent like him,

Makes factious feasts, rails on our state of war

Bold as an oracle, and sets Thersites,

A slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint,

To match us in comparisons with dirt,

To weaken and discredit our exposure,

How rank so ever rounded in with danger.

ULYSSES

They tax our policy and call it cowardice,

Count wisdom as no member of the war,

Forestall prescience and esteem no act

But that of hand. The still and mental parts

That do contrive how many hands shall strike

When fitness calls them on, and know by measure

Of their observant toil the enemy’s weight,

Why, this hath not a finger’s dignity.

They call this ‘bed-work’, ‘mapp’ry’, ‘closet war’.

So that the ram that batters down the wall,

For the great swinge and rudeness of his poise

They place before his hand that made the engine,

Or those that with the finesse of their souls

By reason guide his execution.