Before the time of AEsop, though not perhaps of his fables, Homer related a few laughable occurrences of so simple a character as to require little ingenuity.  In this respect he is not much better than a man who recounts some absurd incident he has witnessed without adding sufficient to it to show that he has a humorous imagination.  His mirth, except when merely that of pleasure, is of the old hostile character.  In Iliad, xi, 378, Paris, having hit Diomed, from behind a pillar with an arrow in the foot, springs forth from his concealment and laughs at him, saying he wished he had killed him.  In Iliad, xxi, 407, where the gods descend into the battle, Minerva laughs at Mars when she has struck him with a huge stone so that he fell, his hair was draggled in the dust, and his armour clanged around him.  In the Odyssey, Ulysses speaks of his heart laughing within him after he had put out Polyphemus’ eye with a burning stick without being discovered.  And in Book xviii, Ulysses strikes Irus under the ear and breaks his head, so that blood pours from his mouth, and he falls gnashing and struggling on the ground, at which, we are told, the suitors “die with laughter.”

From this hostile phase the transition was easy to ridiculing personal defects, and so Homer tells us that when the gods at their banquet saw Vulcan, who was acting as butler, “stumping about on his lame leg,” they fell into “unextinguishable laughter.”

Thersites is described as “squint-eyed, lame-legged, with bent shoulders pinched over his chest, a pointed head, and very little hair on it.”  Homer may merely have intended to represent the reviler of kings as odious and despicable, but there seems to be some humour intended.  Ridicule of personal defects must always be of an inferior kind, being a matter of sight, and of small complexity.  As the first advance of the ludicrous was from the hostile to the personal, so the beginning of humour seems to have been the representation of personal defects.[7]

In accordance with this, we find that the only mention of laughter made by Simonides of Amorgos is where he says that some women may be compared to apes, and then gives a very rude description of their persons.  This subservience to the eye can also be observed in the appreciation of monkeys and dancing horses, already mentioned, the latter forming a humorous exhibition, as the animals were trained with a view to amuse.  We have marks of the same optical tendencies in the appreciation of antics and contortions of the body, either as representing personal deformity, or as a kind of puzzling and disorderly action.  A little contemporary story related by Herodotus shows that these pantomimic performances were now becoming fashionable in Athens.  Cleisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, was even at this date so much in favour of competitive examinations, that he determined to give his daughter to the most proficient and accomplished man.  On the appointed day the suitors came to the examination