[22] "Pegasus is omitted by Homer as a monster," Mr. Murray justly observes (_R. G. E_. p. 162, note I). No other poet omitted "monsters"; not Pindar for one, or Hesiod. [23] _R. G. E_. p. 163. [24] _Theogony_, 956-962. [25] _Odyssey_, x. 137. [26] _Odyssey_, xii. 57-62. [27] _Theogony_, 1011-1015. [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? [38] _R. G. E._ p. 196. [39] Pausanias, ix. 18 [40] _Iliad_, xiii. 185, xv. 329, 638. [41] xv. 636-644. [42] Bethe, p. 15. [43] _Iliad_, xiii. 801-832 and _passim_. [44] _R. G. E_. p. 197. CHAPTER XVII THE STORY OF PALAMEDES