Let us next, before going deeper into the "Saga," examine the case of Thersites, the impudent demagogue of _Iliad_, ii., never again mentioned by Homer. Mr. Murray is rather surprised "to find that Thersites is really an independent saga-figure with a life of his own, and very distinguished relations. He was a son of Agrios, the savage Aetolian king, and first cousin once removed of the great Diomedes. His mother was Dia, a palpable goddess." He was killed by Achilles for jeering at his grief over the slain Amazon, Penthesilea. Achilles was purified by Odysseus, but Diomede took up his feud.[33] In Pherecydes (fr. 82), Thersites is an Aetolian, thrown over a rock by Meleager for his cowardice in the boar hunt, but not killed.[34] All this about Thersites is really "saga" stuff,--invented about the date of the _Aethiopis_. But Thersites was no hero of "saga" in the time of Homer. Had he been the son of a goddess (otherwise unknown) and of "a savage Aetolian king" (Homer's Aetolians are as civilised as his other peoples), the poet would have said so. He is most careful, we saw, to tell us who his heroes are (except the Athenians), even when they only appear for the purpose of being slain. But he says not a word about the genealogy and antecedents of Thersites, who is only a man of the λαός or host, food for bronze. "The savage king of the Aetolians," Agrios, has been picked out by some one suffering from la manie cyclique, who was anxious to tell "what became of them all," from _Iliad_, xiv. 114-125: "no doubt an interpolation," says Mr. Leaf, "like many others, of the genealogical school connected with the name of Hesiod." Here, at all events, whether the genealogy be late and Hesiodic or not, Diomede gives to Agamemnon his genealogy, in Aetolia. Portheus _______|__________________ | | | Agrios Melas Oeneus | Tydeus | Diomede The _manie cyclique_ inserted Agrios | Thersites, for it was desired to tell what became of Thersites; and--not to lose sight of a person so notable as Thersites--the poet made Achilles kill him, a much older man than Achilles, for his mockery. Then Diomede (who does not remonstrate when Odysseus calls him the basest, socially, of the host, and beats him) takes up his feud when he is slain.[35] Homer has plainly no idea that Thersites is of royal and divine lineage, all that is a later invention of "the cyclic mania," and is as old, at least, as the age of the Ionian cyclic poet of the _Aethiopis_.[36] The very scholiasts said that Homer marked the base birth of Thersites by saying nothing about his parentage and home.