Thersites

However, a quotation from another lost epic in the Trojan cycle, the Aethiopis, names his parents as Agrius of Calydon and Dia, a daughter of King Porthaon.

"[7] In his Introduction to The Anger of Achilles, Robert Graves speculates that Homer might have made Thersites a ridiculous figure as a way of dissociating himself from him, because his remarks seem entirely justified.

[11] A New Interlude Called Thersites, an anonymous play from 1537 sometimes attributed to Nicholas Udall, is based on a Latin dialogue by Jean Tixier de Ravisi, a professor of rhetoric at the College of Navarre and rector of the University of Paris from 1520–1524, written under the pen name "J. Ravisius Textor."

While derived from plays of Plautus, elements such as combat with a snail ("an old medieval joke, usually at the expense of the Lombards") and an episode in which Telemachus comes to the title character's mother to be cured of worms, are wholly original to this version.

[12] Along with many of the major figures of the Trojan War, Thersites was a character in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602) in which he is described as "a deformed and scurrilous Grecian" and portrayed as a comic servant, in the tradition of the Shakespearean fool, but unusually given to abusive remarks to all he encounters.

Thersites soon leaves Ajax and puts himself into the service of Achilles (portrayed by Shakespeare as a kind of bohemian figure), who appreciates his bitter, caustic humor.

Laurence Sterne writes of Thersites in the last volume of his Tristram Shandy, chapter 14, declaring him to be the exemplar of abusive satire, as black as the ink it is written with.

[13] The Herald, who acts as Master of Revels or Lord of Misrule, strikes Thersites with his mace, at which point he metamorphoses into an egg, from which a bat and an adder are hatched.