The programmatic representation of Thersites as an exponent of blame poetry is summed up in the description of this character as aiskhistos ‘most disgraceful’. In the Poetics of Aristotle (1449a), the semantics of the underlying (a) noun aiskhos ‘disgrace, shame’ and (b) adjective aiskhron ‘disgraceful, shameful’ can be seen as the basic context of blame poetry.