Thersites  

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"The Thersites of Homer who abuses the kings is a standing figure for all times. He does not get in every age . . . the blows that he gets in Homer. But his envy, his egotism, is the thorn which he has to carry in his flesh. And the undying worm that gnaws him is the tormenting consideration that his excellent views and vituperations remain absolutely without result in the world. But our satisfaction at the fate of Thersitism may also have its sinister side."--Philosophy of History (1820s) by Hegel


"If an audience is likely to feel that it is being crowded into a position, if there is any likelihood that the requirements of dramatic "efficiency" would lead to the blunt ignoring of a possible protest from at least some significant portion of the onlookers, the author must get this objection stated in the work itself. But the objection should be voiced in a way that the same breath disposes of it."--Language as Symbolic Action (1966) by Kenneth Burke

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In Greek mythology, Thersites (Θερσίτης) was a rank-and-file soldier of the Greek army during the Trojan War. In the Iliad, he does not have a father's name, which suggests that he should be viewed as a commoner rather than an aristocratic hero. However, a quotation from another lost epic in the Trojan cycle, the Aethiopis, gives his father's name as Agrius.

Homer described him in detail in the Iliad, Book II, even though he plays only a minor role in the story. He is said to be bow-legged and lame and to have shoulders that cave inward. His head is covered in tufts of hair and comes to a point. Vulgar, obscene, somewhat dull-witted, he calls Agamemnon greedy and Achilles a coward, provoking Odysseus to hit him with Agamemnon's sceptre. He is not mentioned elsewhere in the Iliad, but it seems that in the lost Aethiopis Achilles eventually killed him for making fun of his grief over the death of Penthesilea.

Laurence Sterne writes of Thersites in the last volume of his Tristram Shandy, chapter 14, declaring him to be the exemplar of abusive satire, as black as the ink it is written with.

In his Introduction to The Anger of Achilles, Robert Graves speculates that Homer might have made Thersites a ridiculous figure as a way of dissociating himself from him, because his remarks seem entirely justified. This was a way of letting these remarks, along with Odysseus' brutal act of suppression, remain in the record. In fact, Thersites was venerated by Marxist literature in Soviet times.

The role of Thersites as a social critic has been advanced by several philosophers and literary critics, including Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Said and Kenneth Burke.



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