[28] Roscher, Lexikon, vol. i. pp. 108, 109.
[29] Mimnermus, Fragment 11. Bergk.
[30] Argonautica, iii. 309 ff.
[31] Iliad, vii. 468, 469, xxi. 41, xxiii. 747.
[32] Pythian Odes, iv.
[33] R. G. E. pp. 185, 186. All this comes from the Aethiopis, or Sack of Ilios, followed by Chairemon in his tragedy, Achilles Thersitoctonos, with scholia on the Philoctetes (445), Quintus Smyrnaeus (of the fourth century a.d.). Dictys Cretensis, the prose compiler of the second century a.d., does not mention Thersites.
[34] do not enter into the theory of his relations (1) to the pharmakos, driven out of Athens as a human scape-goat, and whipped, perhaps sacrificed; or (2) with Theritas, a name of Ares in Laconia, according to Pausanias. Homer in his Achaean way never alludes to the cruel and lewd, or magical affair of the pharmakos.
[35] Iliad, ii. 246-248. "I deem that no baser-born man (χερειότερον) came with Agamemnon." χερειότερον "virtually = χερείονα, see Iliad, i. 80" (Leaf), where a king is contrasted with ἀνδρὶ χέρηῑ, "a meaner man" (Leaf, in Leaf, Lang, Myers, The Iliad, p. 3).
[36] The Cyclic story also demonstrates its un-Homeric origin by dragging in "the hocus-pocus of purification" (R. G. E. p. 134). But Usener, seeing, in Sir Walter Scott's words, "further into a millstone than the nature of the millstone permits," makes Thersites = Theritas = Enyalios (Hesychius), and suggests that two sacrifices by Spartan lads to Enyalius and Achilles, after a fight with fisticuffs, and ducking of the vanquished, may be "the ritual form of the old battle of Achilles and Thersites" =(?) "the common annual rites of the slaying of Winter by Summer, or of one vegetation god by another" (R. G. E. pp. 186, 187). There was not much of a "battle" between Thersites and Achilles! The millstone, really, has a hole through it. To Homer, Thersites is a nobody. His rank, relationships, and fate are due to the later "Cyclic mania," and to "poetic justice."
[37] Will nobody write it?