The Meaning of Kakos: Disability in Homer’s Iliad

Those chosen to be the pharmakos, the scapegoat in the yearly ritual of the Thargelia in classical Athens, were, as noted in Jean-Pierre Vernant’s and Pierre Videl-Naquet’s Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece (1988), from the “dregs of society,” that is:

the kakourgoi, gibbet fodder whose crimes, physical ugliness, lowly condition and base and repugnant occupations marked them out as inferior, degraded beings, phauloi [of low rank, common], the refuse of society.

The word kakourgoi means, most literally, “those doing ill,” and, by extension, “mischievous, villanous, malefactor.” Kakos is the ancient Greek word for “bad” and “evil,” while ergon is the word for “work” or “deed” (it is the etymological root of the word energy). The etymology of kakos can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European word kakka, “to defecate”: Kakos means nothing nice or good. Its additional meanings are “ugly,” in terms of appearance; “ill-born,” in terms of birth (so the heroes in the Trojan War are all of “noble birth,” gnesios); “cowardly” (think of this meaning again in terms of fighting on the battlefield); “worthless, unskilled, sorry” (for instance, of a sailor or doctor who is “bad” at what he claims to do); “base, evil” in a moral sense; “abusive, foul,” of words. Used as a noun (and in the neuter gender—nouns in ancient Greek can have one of three genders), kakos has the additional meaning of “harm” or “ill,” in the send of “evil coming to a person.”

I have included this list of the meanings of kakos because the many meanings of this ancient Greek word cohere with the description of those whom Vernant and Vidal-Naquet write were chosen to be the pharmakos, the scapegoat. Notably, those chosen to be pharmakoi (the plural form of pharmakos) were not only those who had done some evil—a crime—but also those who were “physically ugly,” “ugly” being another meaning of kakos. Ugliness is clearly associated with baseness of character—and with babbling speech and “nonsense” as well as insolence towards one’s superiors—in the figure of Thersites in Book II (212 ff.) in Homer’s Iliad. Thersites is aischistos, “the ugliest man” who came to Troy—and he is ugly because he is physically disabled, pholkos (bandy- or bow-legged) and , lame in one foot, his shoulders hunching into his chest and his head pointed (phoxos) and nearly bald. Thersites is given a sound beating by Odysseus when he rails against Agamemnon in a “high-pitched, squeaking” voice:

Your tents are filled with bronze and with fair women, for whenever we take a town we give you the pick of them. Would you have yet more gold, which some Trojan is to give you as a ransom for his son, when I or another Achaean has taken him prisoner? or is it some young girl to hide and lie with? It is not well that you, the ruler of the Achaeans, should bring them into such misery. Weakling cowards, women rather than men, let us sail home, and leave this fellow here at Troy to stew in his own meeds of honour, and discover whether we were of any service to him or no. (Homer, Iliad II.224-238)

How unright it is, says Thersites, that you, Agamemnon, should have your pick of the spoils of war—”bronze and fair women”—while leading the entire Greek army into “misery,” kakon. Odysseus rebukes Thersites—saying there is “no viler creature” (ou… chereioteron broton allon (248) )—and beats Thersites so that he gets a bloody bruirse on his back and cries, for which he is described as looking “foolish”or “useless”(achreion). And while everyone laughs at him, they also feel sorry (achnymenoi, “being pained, aggrieved”).

In this passage of Homer’s Iliad, Thersites, in his physical appearance and in his words and actions, embodies the varied meanings of kako mentioned above: He is ugly in his character, speech, and appearance—-though a modern reader is likely to find Odysseus’ beating of a weaker opponent even more ugly, not to mention violent. I would say that Thersites in the Iliad can be seen as a literary representation of the pharmakos, the scapegoat of the Thargelia ritual in classical Athens. The beating and expulsion of Thersites from among the ranks of the Greek army parallels the beating and ritual expulsion of the pharmakos. And just as (according to Vernant and Vidal-Naquet) the annual expulsion of the pharmakos was a means of casting off the community’s collective defilement, so do Thersites’ “insolent” words—expressing what more than a few of the hoi polloi of the Greek army might be thinking after being camped before Troy and away from their homes for ten years—and also his beating by Odysseus provide a sort of “cleansing” or “kathartic” function for the assembled, restless Greeks. Thersites can be seen as voicing what everyone is thinking; once he has said this, he is duly dispatched of by Odysseus, the Greek known for his cunning and crafty speech.

Thersites is barely mentioned for the rest of the Iliad. His brief appearance at the beginning of the Iliad provides a very fleeting moment of comic relief analogous to the description of the lame god of the forge, Hephaistos, serving nectar to the Olympian gods at the end of the first book of the Iliad. And while it can simply be said that, in many ways, attitudes towards the disabled in ancient times and our modern age have changed little—such as the association of disability with ugliness and ignorance (I can only think of the many times when people have spoken about my son Charlie in front of him, as if he cannot understand what is being said), one difference is that we think Thersites and, too, those unnamed pharmakoi cast out of Athens, as worthy subjects for epic treatment themselves.

It is time, that is, for a Thersitiad.