Wikipedia
In Greek mythology, Thersites ( Greek: ) was a soldier of the Greek army during the Trojan War. In the Iliad, he does not have a father's name, which may suggest that he should be viewed as a commoner rather than an aristocratic hero. However, a quotation from another lost epic in the Trojan cycle, the Aethiopis, gives his father's name as Agrius.
Homer described him in detail in the Iliad, Book II, even though he plays only a minor role in the story. He is said to be bow-legged and lame, to have shoulders that cave inward, and a head which is covered in tufts of hair and comes to a point. Vulgar, obscene, and somewhat dull-witted, Thersites disrupts the rallying of the Greek army:
"He got up in the assembly and attacked Agamemnon in the words of Achilles [calling him greedy and a coward] . . . Odysseus then stood up, delivered a sharp rebuke to Thersites, which he coupled with a threat to strip him naked, and then beat him on the back and shoulders with Agamemnon's sceptre; Thersites doubled over, a warm tear fell from his eye, and a bloody welt formed on his back; he sat down in fear, and in pain gazed helplessly as he wiped away his tear; but the rest of the assembly was distressed and laughed . . . There must be a figuration of wickedness as self-evident as Thersites-- the ugliest man who came to Troy-- who says what everyone else is thinking".
He is not mentioned elsewhere in the Iliad, but it seems that in the lost Aethiopis, Achilles eventually killed him "for having torn out the eyes of the Amazon Penthesilea that the hero had just killed in combat."
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. This was a way of letting these remarks, along with Odysseus' brutal act of suppression, remain in the record.
That Odysseus is described as beating Thersites, not with any object of his own, but rather with Agamemnon's sceptre, certainly seems to leave the implications of the event open to the listener's imagination or point of view.
Thersites is a genus of large, air-breathing land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs in the family Camaenidae.