[212] Θερσίτης: from “θέρσος”, the Aeol. form of “θάρσος” daring, rashness, see § 4 f. The name (“Θερσίτας”) appears in a Thessalian inscription of 214 B.C. It is noteworthy that the poet does not say from what country of Greece Thersites came, and thus offends no one by the episode.— Thersites makes his cause odious by his advocacy of it. The vulgar demagogue was intended by the poet to awaken antipathy, and thus is represented to be just as disagreeable and deformed in body as in character. The Greeks always associated a beautiful soul with a beautiful person.
μοῦνος: made emphatic by its position before the caesura. For the form, see § 5 e. ἀμετροεπής: pred. ἐκολῴα: equiv. to “κολῳὸν ἤλαυνε”, cf. 1.575.This text is part of:
Homer's Iliad, Books I-III. Thomas D. Seymour. Boston. Ginn and Company. 1891.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.