Note 36 — Chapter XVI

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."