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Updated: May 4, 2025
Binder; I met him at the Thersites' Lodge down Brixham way only the other day. One of those men I respect. Binder. No respecter of persons talks to me or you or any of them just the same. Binder! BALD: Ar! it's a case of "Well done, Condor!" CAP: Ar! you're right there, Mr. Binder. Mowle. Condor."
The man who had written "Hamlet," "King Lear," "Othello," and "Macbeth," if he wished to find Ulysses, had only to turn his mind's eye inward; and thus we have in this drama Shakespeare's only piece of introspective work. But there is another personage who gives character to this drama, and who is of a very different sort. Thersites sits with Caliban high among Shakespeare's minor triumphs.
Plato's court was expressed from this fancy; and the persons are much about the same parity that is there. You may ask, as Menippus in Lucian, which is Nireus, which Thersites, which the beggar, which the knight; for they are all suited in the same form of a kind of nasty poverty. Only to be out at elbows is in fashion here, and a great indecorum not to be thread-bare.
Cressida, who is sent to her father Calchas, in the Greek camp, in a day becomes "the sluttish spoil of opportunity," and of Diomede, and the comedy praised by the preface-writer of a quarto of 1609, is a squalid tragedy reeking of Thersites and Pandarus, of a light o' love, and the base victory of cruel cowardice over knightly Hector.
Grote does, accept the political condition of things in the Homeric poems, especially in the Iliad, as a safe guide to the political life of Greece in the poet's own day. "The figure of Thersites seems drawn with special spite and venom, as a satire upon the first critics that rose up among the assembled people to question the divine right of kings to do wrong.
Thersites only clamored in the throng, Loquacious, loud, and turbulent of tongue; Awed by no shame, by no respect controlled, In scandal busy, in reproaches bold; With witty malice, studious to defame; Scorn all his joy, and censure all his aim; But chief he gloried, with licentious style, To lash the great, and monarchs to revile.
First, therefore, let our young man be taught to understand good and bad manners and persons, and from thence apply his mind to the words and deeds which the poet decently assigns to either of them. For example, Achilles, though in some wrath, speaks to Agamemnon thus decently: whereas Thersites to the same person speaks reproachfully in this manner:
Many years before, during a debate in the House, Blaine had compared Conkling to Henry Winter Davis as Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion.
"Thou canst meet Hector in single combat; be Achilles!" "But had Thersites stepped forward and claimed the chief command, he had been met with a refusal, or obtained it only to his own shame and confusion of face, before a cloud of witnesses."
Now all the rest sat down and kept their place upon the benches, only Thersites still chattered on, the uncontrolled speech, whose mind was full of words many and disorderly, wherewith to strive against the chiefs idly and in no good order, but even as he deemed that he should make the Argives laugh. And he was ill-favored beyond all men that came to Ilios.
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