Grocott & Ward, comps. Grocott’s Familiar Quotations, 6th ed. 189-?.
Thigh
After that I was instructed, I smote upon my thigh: I was ashamed yea even confounded.
Jeremiah, Chap. xxxi. Ver. 19.
[Smiting upon the thigh was an indication of extreme astonishment and sorrow and expression of grief; and when Asius the Son of Hyrtacus imagined that Jove had falsified the hopes of the Trojans, he smote his thigh and groaned in anguish at the resistance of the Greeks.]
See Homer’s Iliad, Book 12, Line 177, Derby’s Transl.