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If he had read it, could he mean to travesty it in the parts of those big boobies, Ajax and Achilles? Ulysses, Nestor, and Agamemnon are true to their parts in the 'Iliad ; they are gentlemen at least. Thersites, though unamusing, is fairly deducible from it. Troilus and Cressida are a fine graft upon it. But those two big bulks" Disraeli wrote a book on the Quarrels of Authors.
He had the air of a gentleman, the vocabulary of a scholar, the style of a Junius, and the heart of a Thersites. Talk, in such company, is impossible. The sense of something evil, lurking beneath the play of wit, is like the knowledge that there are snakes in the grass. Every step must be taken with fear.
We may be sure the real Thersites, from whom the poet drew his picture, was a very different and a far more serious power in debate than the misshapen buffoon of the Iliad.
Slender and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are fools, troubled with an uneasy consciousness of their folly, which in the latter produces meekness and docility, and in the former, awkwardness, obstinacy, and confusion. Cloten is an arrogant fool, Osric a foppish fool, Ajax a savage fool; but Nicias is, as Thersites says of Patroclus, a fool positive.
See how Locke, discussing it from this point of view, keeps the question pragmatic: Suppose, he says, one to think himself to be the same soul that once was Nestor or Thersites. Can he think their actions his own any more than the actions of any other man that ever existed?
And we shall fix our young men more if, when we enter him in the poets, we first describe poetry to him and tell him that it is an imitating art and is in many respects like unto painting; not only acquainting him with that common saying, that poetry is vocal painting and painting silent poetry, but showing him, moreover, that when we see a lizard or an ape or the face of a Thersites in a picture, we are surprised with pleasure and wonder at it, not because of any beauty in the things, but for the likeness of the draught.
While they were thus engaged, came creeping up with the stage stride of a double step, and dragging one foot behind him, Menelaus, whom Thersites had, meantime, been taunting, by pointing at him two great ox-horns. He walked all round the lovers, pantomiming rage and jealousy in the accredited ballet style, and then, suddenly approaching, crushed poor Paris's great black hat down over his eyes.
Contemplated through this distorting medium, one set of delegates was taunted with aiming at a monopoly of imperialism and the other with rank hypocrisy. It is superfluous to remark that the idealism and lofty aims of the President of the United States were never questioned by the most reckless Thersites.
Do not men assume to themselves a liberty of telling romances, and framing characters concerning their neighbour, as freely as a poet doth about Hector or Turnus, Thersites or Draucus? Do they not usurp a power of playing with, or tossing about, of tearing in pieces their neighbour's good name, as if it were the veriest toy in the world?
Her sister Arsinoe was a vain and thorough Alexandrian girl, and she had nicknamed the poor thing after the ugliest of the Hellenes who had besieged Troy. "Dame Thersites," and Selene herself had often repeated it.
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