CHAPTER I.

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ANCIENT CLASSICS

FOR

ENGLISH READERS

EDITED BY THE

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.

HOMER

THE ILIAD--THE ODYSSEY

BY REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

The subjects in this Series may be had separately, in cloth, price 2s.

6d.; or two volumes bound in one, in leather back and marbled sides and

edges, arranged as follows:--

THE ILIAD AND

ODYSSEY.

HERODOTUS.

XENOPHON.

EURIPIDES.

ARISTOPHANES.

PLATO.

LUCIAN.

ÆSCHYLUS.

SOPHOCLES.

HESIOD AND THEOGNIS.

ANTHOLOGY.

VIRGIL.

HORACE.

JUVENAL.

PLAUTUS AND TERENCE.

CÆSAR.

TACITUS.

CICERO.

PLINY.

HOMER

THE ILIAD

BY THE

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.

AUTHOR OF

‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MDCCCLXXI

ADVERTISEMENT.

It is proposed to give, in these little volumes, some such introduction

to the great writers of Greece and Rome as may open to those who have

not received a classical education--or in whose case it has been

incomplete and fragmentary--a fair acquaintance with the contents of

their writings, and the leading features of their style.

The constant allusions in our own literature, and even in our daily

press, to the works of the ancient classical authors, and the

familiarity with the whole _dramatis personæ_ of ancient history and

fable which modern writers on all subjects assume on the part of their

readers, make such an acquaintance almost necessary for those who care

not only to read but to understand.

Even in the case of readers who have gone through the regular classical

course in their day, this acquaintance, if honest confession were made,

would be found very imperfect. It is said, of course, that “every

English gentleman reads Horace;” but this is one of those general

assertions which rest upon very loose ground. An ordinary observer of

the habits of the class might find himself somewhat at a loss for

instances.

In the case of ladies, and of the large body of general readers who have

received either no classical education, or a very imperfect one,

probably less is now known of Homer, Virgil, or Horace, than in the days

when Pope’s, Dryden’s, and Francis’s translations were first published,

and took their place for the time on every literary table.

There appears a strong probability that the study of Greek and Latin,

which has so long been our exclusive idea of a “liberal” education, will

hereafter be confined within a narrower circle. Yet some knowledge of

the ancient classics must continue to be the key to much of our best

English literature. If, as some educational reformers suggest, a

systematic course of English reading be substituted for Latin and Greek

in our “middle-class” schools, such a training will necessarily involve

the careful study of the masters of English thought and style, and more

especially of those earlier authors whose taste was formed very much

upon the old classical models, and whose writings are full of allusions

to their characters and imagery.

It may be said that we have translations of all the best and most

popular of the classical authors, and that many of these are admirable

in their execution. This is quite true. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the

Æneid, Horace, and some of the Greek Dramatists, have lately found

translators who, in point of taste and general accuracy, leave little to

be desired. But the results of their work will be best enjoyed and

valued by those whose acquaintance with the originals enables them to

appreciate not only the positive beauty of the English version, but its

relative merit as conveying the spirit and sense of the Greek or Latin

author. Even the best translation (especially of the classical poets)

may fail to have a continuous interest for the merely modern reader,

unless he has some previous familiarity with the argument of the work,

the personages introduced, and the characteristics of the age in which

the scene and action lie.

The aim of the present series will be to explain, sufficiently for

general readers, who these great writers were, and what they wrote; to

give, wherever possible, some connected outline of the story which they

tell, or the facts which they record, checked by the results of modern

investigations; to present some of their most striking passages in

approved English translations, and to illustrate them generally from

modern writers; to serve, in short, as a popular retrospect of the chief

literature of Greece and Rome. The attempt appeals, as will be seen, to

a circle outside that of classical scholarship; though possibly some who

have all legal claim to rank as scholars, but who now stand rather on

the “retired list” of that service, may in these pages meet some old

acquaintances whom they have almost forgotten. If, in any case, they

find our re-introduction unsatisfactory, none would advise them more

heartily than we do to renew the old personal intercourse for

themselves.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTRODUCTION, 1

CHAP. I. THE QUARREL OF AGAMEMNON AND ACHILLES, 25

“ II. THE DUEL OF PARIS AND MENELAUS, 48

“ III. THE BROKEN TRUCE, 63

“ IV. THE FIRST DAY’S BATTLE, 69

“ V. THE SECOND DAY’S BATTLE, 88

“ VI. THE EMBASSY TO ACHILLES, 94

“ VII. THE THIRD BATTLE, 104

“ VIII. THE DEATH OF PATROCLUS, 113

“ IX. THE RETURN OF ACHILLES, 121

“ X. THE DEATH OF HECTOR, 128

“ XI. CONCLUDING REMARKS, 139

It has been thought desirable in these pages to use the Latin names of

the Homeric deities, as more familiar to English ears. As, however, most

modern translators have followed Homer’s Greek nomenclature, it may be

convenient here to give both.

Zeus = Jupiter.

Herè = Juno.

Arēs = Mars.

Poseidōn = Neptune.

Pallas Athenè = Minerva.

Aphroditè = Venus.

Hephaistos = Vulcan.

Hermes = Mercury.

Artemis = Diana.

The passages marked (D.) are from Lord Derby’s translation; (W.) from Mr

Worsley’s; and (P.) Pope’s.

INTRODUCTION.

It is quite unnecessary here to discuss the question, on which the

learned are very far from being agreed, whether Homer--the “Prince of

Poets”--had any real existence; whether he was really the author of the

two great poems which bear his name, or whether they are the collected

works of various hands, dovetailed into each other by some clever editor

of ancient times. Homer will still retain his personality for the

uncritical reader, however a sceptical criticism may question it. The

blind old bard, wandering from land to land, singing his lays of the old

heroic times to a throng of admiring listeners, must always continue to

be the familiar notion of the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Such

was the universal creed of the world of readers until a comparatively

recent date; and the speculations of modern scholars, in this as in

other cases, have been much more successful in shaking the popular

belief than in replacing it by any constructive theory of their own

which is nearly so credible. “Homer” is quite as likely to have been

really Homer, as a mere name under whose shadow the poems of various

unknown writers have been grouped.

There is extant a Life of the poet, said to have been composed by the

Greek historian Herodotus, quoted as such by early writers, and

possibly, after all, quite as trustworthy as the destructive conjectures

of those critics who would allow him no life at all. There we are told

that his birth, like that of so many heroes of antiquity, was

illegitimate; that he was the son of Critheis, who had been betrayed by

her guardian; that he was born near Smyrna, on the banks of the river

Meles, and was thence called “Melesigenes.” His mother is said

afterwards to have married a schoolmaster named Phemius, by whom the boy

was adopted, and in due course succeeded to his new father’s occupation.

But the future bard soon grew weary of such confinement. He set out to

see the world; visiting in turn Egypt, Italy, Spain, the islands of the

Mediterranean, and gathering material for at least one of his great

works, the adventures of the hero Odysseus (Ulysses), known to us as the

Odyssey. In the course of his travels he became blind, and thence was

called “Homeros”--“the blind man”--such at least is one of the

interpretations of his name.[1] In that state returning to his native

town of Smyrna, he, like his great English successor, Milton, composed

his two great poems. One of the few passages in which any personal

allusion to himself has been traced, or fancied, in Homer’s verse, is a

scene in the Odyssey, where the blind harper Demodocus is introduced as

singing his lays in the halls of King Alcinous:--

“Whom the Muse loved, and gave him good and ill--

Ill, that of light she did his eyes deprive;

Good, that sweet minstrelsies divine at will

She lent him, and a voice men’s ears to thrill.” (W.)

So, in the same poem, the only other bard who appears is also

blind--Phemius, who is compelled to exercise his art for the diversion

of the dissolute suitors of Penelope. The fact of blindness is in itself

by no means incompatible with the notion of Homer’s having constructed

and recited even two such long poems as the Iliad and the Odyssey. The

blind have very frequently remarkable memories, together with a ready

ear and passionate love for music.

For the rest of his life, Homer is said to have roamed from city to city

as a wandering minstrel, singing his lays through the towns of Asia

Minor, in the islands of the Archipelago, and even in the streets of

Athens itself, and drawing crowds of eager listeners wherever he went by

the wondrous charm of his song. This wandering life has been assumed to

imply that he was an outcast and poor. The uncertainty of his

birthplace, and the disputes to which it gave rise in after times, were

the subject of an epigram whose pungency passed for truth--

“Seven rival towns contend for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread.”

But the begging is not in the original lines at all, and a wandering

minstrel was no dishonoured guest, wherever he appeared, in days much

later than Homer’s. Somewhere on the coast of the Levant he died and

was buried, leaving behind him that name which retains its spell hardly

weakened by the lapse of some twenty-seven centuries, and the two great

poems which have been confessedly the main source of the epic poetry,

the heroic drama, and the early romance of Europe.

Other works are ascribed to Homer’s name besides the Iliad and the

Odyssey, but the authorship appears more doubtful. If we trust the

opinion of Aristotle, Homer was the father of comic narrative poetry as

well as of epic. The poem called ‘Margites,’ attributed to him,

contained the travels and adventures of a wealthy and pedantic coxcomb:

but slight fragments only of this have been preserved--enough to show

that the humour was somewhat more gross than one would expect from the

poet of the Odyssey, though redeemed, no doubt, by satire of a higher

kind, as in the surviving line which, in describing the hero’s

accomplishments, seems to anticipate the multifarious and somewhat

superficial knowledge of the present day--

“Full many things he knew--and ill he knew them all.”

Admitting the personality of the poet himself, and his claim to the

authorship of both Iliad and Odyssey, it is not necessary to suppose

that either poem was framed originally as a whole, or recited as a whole

upon every occasion. No doubt the song grew as he sung. He would

probably add from time to time to the original lay. The reciter, whose

audience must depend entirely upon him for their text, has an almost

unlimited licence of interpolation and expansion. It may be fairly

granted also that future minstrels, who sung the great poet’s lays

after his death, would interweave with them here and there something of

their own, more or less successful in its imitation of the original.

Such explanation of the repetitions and incongruities which are to be

found in the Iliad seems at least as reasonable as the supposition that

its twenty-four books are the work of various hands, “stitched

together”--such is one explanation of the term “rhapsody”--in after

times, and having a common origin only in this, that all sung of the

“wondrous Tale of Troy.”

That tale was for generations the mainspring of Greek legend and song,

and the inspiration of Greek painters and sculptors. At this day, the

attempt to separate the fabulous from the real, to reduce the rich

colouring of romance into the severe outlines of history, is a task

which even in the ablest hands seems hopeless. The legends themselves

are various, and contradictory in their details. The leading characters

in the story--Priam, Helen, Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses, Paris, Hector

and Andromache--appear in as many different aspects and relations as the

fancy of each poet chose. In this respect they are like the heroes of

our own “Round Table” romances; like Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot,

Tristram, and Percival--common impersonations on whom all kinds of

adventures are fastened, though the main characteristics of the portrait

are preserved throughout. What amount of bare historical truth may or

may not underlie the poetical colouring--whether there was or was not a

real Greek expedition and a real siege of Troy, less “heroic” and more

probable in its extent and details than the Iliad represents it--is no

question to be here discussed. So far as literary interest is

concerned, “the real Trojan war,” as Mr Grote well says, “is that which

is recounted by Homer.” It will be sufficient here to take the poet as

our main authority, and to fill up his picture from other legendary

sources; for though Homer’s version of the Great Trojan War is the

earliest account which has come down to us, he drew his material from

still earlier lays and legends, with which he assumes all his readers

(or hearers) to be tolerably familiar; and which, again, the later poets

and tragedians reproduced with many additions and variations of their

own.

The preservation of poems of such great length (the Iliad alone contains

between fifteen and sixteen thousand lines) in days when writing, even

if invented, was in its infancy, has been the subject of much

speculation. That they were publicly recited at great national festivals

in all parts of Greece, is undoubted. Professional minstrels, or

“rhapsodists,” as they were called, chanted certain selected portions

which suited their own taste or that of their audience--often such as

contained the exploits of some national hero. They followed possibly in

this the example of the great bard himself; just as certain of our own

popular writers have lately taken to read, to an admiring public, some

favourite scenes and chapters from their own works. Lycurgus is said to

have brought the collected poems from Asia to Sparta; Solon, at Athens,

to have first obliged the minstrels to recite the several portions in

due order, so as to preserve the continuity of the narrative.

Pisistratus, the great Athenian ruler, has the reputation of having

first reduced the whole into a collected shape, and of having thus far

settled the “text” of Homer, employing in this work the most eminent

men of letters of his day. There is a legend of a Homeric ‘Septuagint:’

of seventy learned scribes employed in the great work, as in the Greek

version of the Hebrew Scriptures. From the time when the Iliad and

Odyssey were reduced to writing, their popularity rather increased than

waned. They were the storehouse of Greek history, genealogy, and

antiquity--the models and standards of literary taste. To be

unacquainted with these masterpieces, was to be wholly without culture

and education: and, thanks to their continual and public recital, this

want was perhaps less prevalent amongst the Greeks than amongst

ourselves. The young Alcibiades, when receiving the usual education of a

Greek gentleman, is said to have struck his tutor one day in a burst of

righteous indignation, for having made the confession--certainly

inexcusable in his vocation--that he did not possess a copy of the great

poet. Alexander the Great carried always with him the copy which had

been corrected by his master Aristotle, preserved in a jewelled casket

taken amongst the spoils of Darius. No pains were spared in the

caligraphy, or costliness in the mountings, of favourite manuscripts of

the Homeric poems. They continued to be regarded with almost a

superstitious reverence even during the middle ages of Christendom.

Men’s future destinies were discovered, by a sort of rude divination, in

verses selected at hap-hazard. Fantastic writers saw in the two poems

nothing more or less than allegorical versions of Hebrew history; and

grave physicians recommended as an infallible recipe for a _quartan_

ague, the placing every night a copy of the _fourth_ book of the Iliad

under the patient’s head. Modern critical speculations have gone quite

as far in another direction. In the eyes of some ingenious theorists,

this siege of Troy is but “a repetition of the daily siege of the East

by the solar powers that every evening are robbed of their brightest

treasures in the West;”[2] and the Homeric heroes and their exploits all

represent allegorically, in one form or another, the great conflict

between Light and Darkness. But such questions are beyond the scope of

these pages; we are content here to take the tale of Troy as the poet

tells it.

The supposed date of the story may be taken as some fifteen centuries

before the Christian era. The great City of Troy, or Ilium, lay on the

coast of Asia Minor--its reputed site still bearing the name of the

Troad, a broad well-watered champaign, with a height still recognised as

the citadel towering above it. “No royal seat of the ancient world,”

says a modern visitor to the spot, “could boast a grander situation than

the Trojan citadel.”[3] As to its actual locality and existence, there

is little ground for scepticism. The tradition of the name and place was

unbroken in the early historical ages of Greece. Xerxes, king of Persia,

in his expedition, is said to have visited the citadel, and to have

offered there a thousand oxen to the tutelary goddess; possibly, it has

been suggested, claiming to be the avenger of the Asiatic kings on their

European enemies.[4] Mindarus, the Lacedæmonian admiral, seventy years

later, sacrificed there also: and Alexander, when he crossed the

Hellespont, not only did the same, but took from the temple some of the

sacred arms which were hung there (said to be those of the heroes of

the great siege), offering up his own in exchange. The founder of the

city was Ilus, son of Tros, and from these mythical heroes it took its

two names. But its walls were built by the grandson, Laomedon. He

employed some remarkable workmen. In one of the most striking and

suggestive fables of the Greek mythology, certain of the gods are

represented as being condemned by Zeus (or Jupiter) to a period of

servitude upon earth. Poseidon (Neptune) and Apollo were under this

condemnation, and undertook, for certain rewards, to help Laomedon in

his fortifications. But when the work was finished, the ungrateful king

repudiated his bargain. As a punishment, a sea-monster is sent to ravage

his dominions, who can only be appeased by the sacrifice of a maiden of

noble blood. The lot falls upon the king’s own daughter, Hesione. It is

the original version of St George and the Dragon. Laomedon offers his

daughter, and certain horses of immortal breed (which he seems to count

even a more valuable prize), to the champion who will deliver her and

slay the monster. Hercules comes to the rescue; but a second time

Laomedon breaks his word. He substitutes mortal horses, and refuses his

daughter. Hercules attacks the city, kills Laomedon, and carries off the

princess Hesione, whom he gives to his comrade Telamon. From this union

are born two heroes, Ajax and his brother Teucer, whom we shall meet in

the second and great Siege of Troy, which forms the subject of Homer’s

Iliad.

This double perjury of Laomedon’s is one supposed cause of the wrath of

Heaven resting on the town and its people. Yet Apollo, forgetful, it

would seem, of his former unworthy treatment, and only remembering with

affection the walls which he had helped to build, is represented as

taking part with the Trojans in the great struggle, in which the deities

of Olympus are bitterly divided amongst themselves.

But Homer’s Tale of Troy says nothing of Laomedon and his broken faith.

His poem is built upon a later legend. This legend embraces in the whole

a period of thirty years, divided exactly, in a manner very convenient

for both poet and reader, into complete decades; ten years of

preparation for the siege, ten occupied in the siege itself (with which

alone the Iliad has to do), and ten consumed in the weary wanderings and

final return home of the surviving Greek heroes who had taken part in

the expedition.

The first decade begins with the carrying off from the court of

Menelaus, king of Sparta, of his wife Helen, by a young Asiatic prince

whom he has entertained in his travels. Helen is the reputed daughter of

Jupiter by Leda, and upon her Venus has bestowed the fatal endowment of

matchless and irresistible beauty. The young prince whom she unhappily

captivates is Paris or Alexander, son of Priam, king of Troy. Terrible

oracles had accompanied the birth of him who was to prove the curse of

his father’s people. His mother Hecuba dreamed that she gave birth to a

flaming brand. The child when born was exposed on Mount Ida, so as to

insure his death in infancy without incurring the guilt of blood. But,

as in similar legends, the precaution did but help to fulfil the

prophecy. In the solitudes of the mountain he grew up, a boy of wondrous

beauty, the nursling and the favourite of Venus. There he was called

upon to decide to whom the “Prize of Beauty”--the golden apple thrown

by Discord into the feast of the Immortals, with that insidious legend

inscribed on it--should be awarded. Three competing goddesses--Juno,

Venus, and Minerva, who at least, as the goddess of wisdom, ought to

have known better--appeared before the young shepherd in all the

simplicity of immortal costume, in order that he might decide which of

them was “the fairest.” Each tried to bribe him to adjudge the prize to

herself. The Queen of Heaven offered him power in the future; Minerva,

wisdom; Venus, the loveliest woman upon earth. Paris chose the last. It

was Helen; for Venus took it very little into her account that she had a

husband already. It involved also, according to the most picturesque of

the legends, a somewhat similar breach of troth on Paris’s part. In the

valleys of Ida he had already won the love of the nymph Œnone, but he

deserts her without scruple under the new temptation.[5] He has learnt

the secret of his royal birth, and is acknowledged by his father Priam.

In spite of the warnings of his sister Cassandra, who has a gift of

prophecy, and foresees evil from the expedition; in spite, too, of the

forsaken Œnone’s wild denunciations, he fits out ships and sets sail for

Greece. Admitted as a guest to the hospitable court of Menelaus at

Sparta, he charms both him and Helen by his many accomplishments. The

king, gallant and unsuspicious, and of somewhat easy temperament, as

appears from several passages of Homer, leaves him still an inmate of

his palace, while he himself makes a voyage to Crete. In the husband’s

absence, Paris succeeds--not without some degree of violence, according

to some of the legends--in carrying off the wife, loading his ships at

the same time (to give emphatic baseness to the exploit) with a rich

freight of gold and treasures, the spoils of his absent host. So Venus’s

promise is made good, and Priam weakly receives into his palace the

fatal beauty who is to prove the ruin of the Trojan fortunes.

The outrage rouses all Greece to arms. Menelaus appeals to his brother

Agamemnon, king of Argos and Mycenæ, who held some sort of suzerainty

over the whole of Greece. The brother-kings were the sons of Atreus, of

the great house of Pelops, who gave his name to the peninsula known as

the Peloponnesus, and now the Morea. It was a house eminent for wealth

and splendour and influence. According to an old proverb, valour and

wisdom were given by the gods to other names in larger measure, but

wealth and power belonged of divine right to the Atridæ. This power must

not be hastily pronounced fabulous. There yet remain traces of the mural

and sepulchral architecture of Agamemnon’s capital, Mycenæ, which are

strongly significant of a pre-historical civilisation--an “iron age” of

massive strength and no mean resources.[6] Agamemnon, in Homer’s poem,

carries a sceptre which had literally, not metaphorically, come down to

him as an heirloom from the king of the gods. Vulcan himself had

wrought it for Jupiter; Jupiter had given it to Hermes, Hermes to

Pelops, and so it had been handed on. It was in some sort the prototype

of those more than mortal weapons wielded by the heroes of medieval

romance, which were one secret of their invincible prowess, and which

had come from the hand of no human armourer; like the sword Durentaille,

which belonged to Charlemagne, and was by him given to his nephew

Roland; like Arthur’s Excalibur; or the marvellous blade Recuite, which

passed from the hands of Alexander the Great to Ptolemy, from Ptolemy to

Judas Maccabæus, and so, through many intermediate owners, to the

Emperor Vespasian. To the monarchs of the house of Pelops, then,

belonged in uncommon degree “the divinity that doth hedge a king;” and

Agamemnon is recognised, throughout the whole of the Homeric story, as

pre-eminently “King of Men.” But a terrible curse rested on the house--a

curse connected with a revolting legend, which, as not recognised by

Homer, needs no further notice here, but which was to find ample

fulfilment in the sequel of Agamemnon’s history.

The royal sons of Atreus take hasty counsel with such of the

neighbouring kings and chiefs as they can collect, how they may avenge

the wrong. One legend tells us that Tyndarus, the reputed father of

Helen, before he gave her in marriage to Menelaus, had pledged all her

suitors, among whom were the noblest names of Greece, to avenge any such

attempt against the honour of the husband he should choose for her,

whichever of them he might be: and that they now redeemed that pledge

when called upon by the king of Sparta. Nestor, king of Pylos, and a

chief named Palamedes, went through the coasts of Greece, denouncing

the perfidy of the foreign adventurer, and rousing the national feeling

of the Greeks, or, as Homer prefers to call them, the Achæans. The

chiefs did not all obey the summons willingly. Odysseus--better known to

us under the Latin form of his name as Ulysses--king of the rocky island

of Ithaca, feigned madness to escape from his engagement. But the shrewd

Palamedes detected the imposture. He went to the field where the king,

after the simple fashion of the times, was ploughing, carrying with him

from the house his infant child Telemachus, and laid him down in the

furrow which Ulysses was moodily driving, apparently insensible to all

other sights and sounds. The father turned the plough aside, and his

assumed madness was at once detected. In some cases, where there were

several sons of military age in the same family, lots were cast for the

unwelcome honour of serving against Troy. Some even sent bribes to

Agamemnon to induce him to set them free from their engagement.

Echepolus of Sicyon, loath to leave his vast possessions, sent to the

great king his celebrated mare Œthe, the fleetest of her kind, as his

personal ransom. The bribe was accepted, and Œthe went to Troy instead

of her luxurious master. The story has been adduced in proof of

Agamemnon’s greediness in thus preferring private gain to the public

interests: but no less a critic than Aristotle has sagaciously observed,

that a good horse was a far more valuable conscript than an unwilling

soldier. Some heroes, on the other hand, went resolutely to the war,

though the fates foretold that they should never return from it alive.

Euchenor of Corinth, though rich like Echepolus, could not be persuaded

to remain at home, even when his aged father, who was a seer himself,

forewarned him of his doom; he boldly dared his fate, and fell at the

close of the siege by the hand of Paris.

Under somewhat similar auguries the great hero of Homer’s tale left his

home for Troy. Achilles, said the legends, was the son of the

ocean-goddess Thetis by a mortal lover, Peleus son of Æacus. The gods

had honoured the marriage with their personal presence--

“For in that elder time, when truth and worth

Were still revered and cherished here on earth,

The tenants of the skies would oft descend

To heroes’ spotless homes, as friend to friend;

There meet them face to face, and freely share

In all that stirred the hearts of mortals there.”[7]

The Roman poet Catullus tells us in the same beautiful ode, how mortals

and immortals alike brought their wedding gifts: Chiron the centaur

(“that divine beast,” as Pindar calls him) comes from the mountains

laden with coronals of flowers for the banquet, and Peneus, the

Thessalian river-god, brings whole trees of beech and bay and cypress to

shade the guests. Even the three weird sisters, the inexorable Fates,

tune their voices for this once into a nuptial hymn, and while their

spindles “run and weave the threads of doom,” they chant the future

glories of the child that shall be born from this auspicious union.

Neptune presents the fortunate bridegroom with two horses of divine

breed--Xanthus and Balius--and Chiron gives him a wondrous ashen spear.

Both these gifts passed afterwards as heirlooms to Achilles, the

offspring of this marriage, and were carried by him to Troy.

Achilles is the very model of a hero, such as heroes would be accounted

in times when the softer and nobler qualities of true heroism were

unknown. Strong and beautiful in person, as a goddess-born should be;

haughty, and prompt to resent insult, but gallant and generous;

passionate alike in his love and in his hate; a stanch friend, and a

bitter enemy. He is the prototype of Sir Lancelot in many points--“the

goodliest person that ever came among press of knights--the truest

friend to his lover that ever bestrod horse--the sternest man to his

mortal foe that ever put spear in rest.” The epithet which Homer himself

gives him is precisely that which was given to the English king who was

held to be the flower of chivalry--“Lionheart.” Though in personal

strength and speed of foot he excels all the other heroes of the

expedition, yet he is not a mere fighter, like his comrade Ajax, but has

all the finer tastes and accomplishments of an age which, however fierce

and barbarous in many respects, shows yet a high degree of civilisation.

Music and song beguile for him the intervals of battle, and, whether

indignant, sarcastic, or pathetic, he is always an admirable speaker.

There is something of a melancholy interest about him, too, not

inappropriate to a hero of romance, which the poet never allows us to

forget. He has come to Troy with his doom upon him, and he knows it. His

goddess-mother has told him that there is a twofold destiny possible for

him: either to live in wealth and peace, and such happiness as they can

bring, a long life of inglorious ease in his native land of Phthia, or

to embrace in foreign warfare a brief career of victory, a warrior’s

death, and undying glory. He makes his choice as a hero should--

“One crowded hour of glorious life

Is worth an age without a name.”

One fable runs that his mother, Thetis, dipped him when an infant in the

river Styx, which made him invulnerable in every point except the heel,

by which she held him:[8] but there is no mention of this in the Iliad,

and he goes into battle, for all that appears, as liable to wounds and

death as any other mortal warrior, and with a presentiment that the last

awaits him before the capture of Troy is complete.

At length the ten years’ preparations were all completed. The harbour of

Aulis on the coast of Bœotia was the place fixed for the rendezvous.

From every quarter where the great race of the Achæans had

settled,--from the wooded valleys of Thessaly, from all the coasts of

the Peloponnesus, and the neighbouring islands, from Ithaca and

Cephallenia on the west to Crete and Rhodes on the east--the chiefs and

their following were gathered. A hundred ships--long half-decked

row-galleys, whose average complement was about eighty men--were manned

from Agamemnon’s own kingdom of Mycenæ, and he supplied also sixty more

to carry the contingent of the Arcadians, who, as an inland people, had

no fleet of their own. His brother Menelaus brought sixty; Nestor of

Pylos, ninety; Idomeneus of Crete, and Diomed of Argos, eighty each.

Ulysses and Ajax did but contribute each twelve galleys; but the leaders

were a host in themselves. In all there were twelve hundred vessels,

carrying above 100,000 men. With the exception of the chiefs and two or

three officials attached to each galley, such as the helmsman and the

steward, all on board were rowers when at sea, and fighting-men on land.

The expedition has been well termed a secular crusade. It was

undertaken, as modern politicians would say, “for an idea;” not for

conquest, but for a point of honour. It might be questioned, indeed, how

far the object was worth the cost. There was at least one of the

neighbouring kings who at the time took a very unromantic and

utilitarian view of the matter. Poltis, king of Thrace, was applied to

amongst the rest for his assistance. He inquired into the cause of the

expedition; and when he heard it, he suggested an arrangement which

might accommodate all differences without the necessity of an appeal to

arms. “It is hard,” he said, “for Menelaus to lose a wife: yet very

probably Paris wanted one. Now I have two wives, whom I can well spare;

I will send one to Menelaus, and the other to Paris; and so all parties

will be satisfied.” But we might have lost the Iliad if his counsel had

been taken.

The great host set sail; but the first time, says the legend, they

missed their way. They mistook a part of the coast called Teuthrania for

the plains of Troy; and then, re-embarking, were driven by a storm back

to the shores of Greece. A second time they made their rendezvous at

Aulis; but Agamemnon had incurred the anger of Diana, and the fleet lay

wind-bound for many weeks. It was then that deed of purest tragedy was

done, which, though it forms no part of Homer’s story, has been so often

the subject of song, of painting, and of sculpture, and has received so

many illustrations in modern literature, that it must find place here.

The king is informed by the oracle that the wrath of Heaven can only be

appeased by the sacrifice of his virgin daughter Iphianassa, or as she

is more commonly called, Iphigenia. Reluctantly, and only after a bitter

struggle with his feelings, urged by the importunate clamour of the

whole army, and in obedience to his conception of his duties as their

chief, the father consented. The story is immortalised by the anecdote

told of Timanthes, the painter of Sicyon, when competing with a rival in

a picture of the sacrifice. The point of admitted difficulty with both

the competitors was to portray the agony in the father’s features at the

moment when the sacrificing priest was about to strike the fatal blow.

The great artist represented the king as wrapping his face in the folds

of his mantle, and was at once pronounced the winner of the prize. Mr

Tennyson--never more successful than when he draws his inspiration from

the old classical sources--has made tasteful use of both legend and

anecdote in his ‘Dream of Fair Women.’ It is Iphigenia who speaks:--

“I was cut off from hope in that sad place,

Which yet to name my spirit loathes and fears:

My father held his hand upon his face;

I, blinded with my tears,

“Still strove to speak: my voice was thick with sighs,

As in a dream. Dimly I could descry

The stern black-bearded kings with wolfish eyes,

Waiting to see me die.

“The tall masts quivered as they lay afloat,

The temples and the people and the shore;

One drew a sharp knife through my tender throat,

Slowly,--and nothing more.”

There was, however, a less harrowing version of the legend. As in the

parallel case of Jephtha’s daughter, there were found interpreters who

could not bear that the sacrifice should be carried out. They said that

in mercy Diana substituted a fawn, and carried off the maiden to serve

her as a priestess in perpetual maidenhood at her shrine in the Tauric

Chersonese. It is this version of the tale which the Greek tragedian

Euripides has followed in his “Iphigenia in Aulis.” Racine, in his

tragedy, avails himself of a third version of the catastrophe. The

victim whom Calchas’ oracle demands must be a princess of the blood of

Helen. This Agamemnon’s daughter was--her mother Clytemnestra being

Helen’s sister. But at the last moment another Iphigenia is found,

offspring of a previous secret marriage of Helen with Theseus. The

French tragedian, following Euripides in representing the princess as

promised in marriage to Achilles, has given the necessary amount of

romance to the _denouement_ by introducing the hero as an impetuous

lover of the modern type, surrounding the altar with his faithful

Myrmidons, and vowing that Calchas himself shall be the first

victim--until the old soothsayer hits upon the expedient of a

satisfactory substitute.

The wrath of Diana is appeased, the favouring gales are granted, and

once more the Greek armament sets sail. They break their voyage at the

island of Tenedos; and from thence Menelaus, accompanied by Ulysses, who

is the diplomatist of the army, proceeds to Troy to make a final demand

for reparation. Even now, if the Trojans will give back Helen and the

treasures, the Greeks will be satisfied. But the terms were rejected,

though the reception of the embassy at Troy seems to mark a high state

of civilisation. So the expedition proceeds: but before they make good

their landing on the Trojan coast, the Fates demand another victim. The

oracle had said that the first who set foot on Trojan soil must fall.

There was a hesitation even among the bravest of the Greeks, and the

Trojans and their allies were lining the shore. Protesilaus of Phylacè,

with a gallant disregard of omens, leapt to land, and fell, first of his

countrymen, by a Dardanian spear--launched, as one legend has it, by the

noble hand of Hector. Homer has a pathetic touch in his mention of

him:--

“Unfinished his proud palaces remain,

And his sad consort beats her breast in vain.”

On this slight foundation the Roman poet, Ovid, has constructed one of

the sweetest of his imaginary ‘Epistles’--that of the wife Laodamia to

the husband of whom she complains as sending no message home, undreaming

that he had long since found a grave on the soil of Troy. A later legend

tells us that she wearied the gods with prayers and tears, by night and

day, to obtain permission to see her husband once again on earth. The

boon was granted: for the space of three hours the dead hero was allowed

to revisit his home, and Laodamia died in his embrace. There is a poetic

sequel to the tradition, preserved by Pliny,[9] and thus beautifully

rendered in the concluding lines of Wordsworth’s ‘Laodamia:’--

“Upon the side

Of Hellespont (such faith was entertained)

A knot of spiry trees for ages grew

From out the tomb of him for whom she died;

And ever, when such stature they had gained

That Ilium’s walls were subject to their view,

The trees’ tall summits withered at the sight--

A constant interchange of growth and blight!”

The Trojans, too, had their allies, who came to their aid, when the

invasion was imminent, from the neighbouring tribes of Mysia, Caria,

Phrygia, and even the coast towns of Thrace. The most renowned of these

auxiliary chiefs were Sarpedon, who led the Lycian troops, and Æneas,

commander of the Dardanians. Both claimed an immortal descent: Æneas was

the son of Venus by a human lover, Anchises, and sprung from a branch of

the royal house of Troy: Sarpedon’s father was no less than Jupiter

himself. Next after Hector, the most warlike, but not the eldest of the

sons of Priam, these are the most illustrious names on the side of the

Trojans in Homer’s story. But the force of the invaders was too strong

to allow their adversaries to keep the open field. Soon they were driven

inside the walls of the city, while the Greeks ravaged all the

neighbouring coast almost unopposed, and maintained themselves at the

enemy’s cost. Then began the weary siege which wasted the hopes and

resources of both armies for ten long years. To the long night-watches

round the camp-fires of the Greeks we are indebted--so the legends

say--for at least one invention which has enlivened many a waste hour

since, and also, it perhaps may be said, has wasted some hours for its

more enthusiastic admirers. Palamedes, to cheer the nagging spirits of

his countrymen, invented for them, among other pastimes, the nobler

game of chess; and kings and castles, knights and pawns, still move in

illustration of the greater game which was then being played on the

plains of Troy. The inventor met with but an ungrateful return,

according to one gloomy legend--which, however, is not Homer’s. Ulysses

had never forgiven him the detection of the pretence of madness by which

he had sought himself to escape the service; nor could he bear so close

a rival in what he considered his own exclusive field of subtlety and

stratagem. He took the occasion of a fishing expedition to plunge the

unfortunate chief overboard.

So much of preface seems almost necessary to enable any reader to whom

the Greek mythology is not already familiar ground, to take up Homer’s

tale with some such previous acquaintance with the subject as the bard

himself would have given him credit for. The want of it has sometimes

made the study of the Iliad less interesting and less intelligent than

it should have been, even to those who have approached it with some

knowledge of the original language.

* * * * *

The galleys of the Greeks, when they reached the Trojan coast, were all

drawn up on shore, as was their invariable custom at the end of a

voyage, and kept in an upright position by wooden shores. The crews,

with the exception of some two or three “ship-keepers” for each galley,

disembarked, and formed some kind of encampment near their respective

vessels. Achilles’ station was on one wing, and that of Ajax on the

other; these points of danger being assigned to the leaders of highest

repute for valour. The chiefs fought in war-chariots of very light

construction, on two wheels and open at the back. These were drawn by

two--or sometimes three--horses, and carried two persons, both standing;

the fighter, armed with sword and shield, and one or two long spears

which were usually hurled at the enemy--and his charioteer, usually a

friend of nearly equal rank. The fighters in most cases dismounted from

their chariots when they came to close quarters, their charioteers

attending on their movements. The combatants of lower degree fought on

foot. There is no mention of cavalry.

THE ILIAD.

CHAPTER I.

THE QUARREL OF AGAMEMNON AND ACHILLES.

Adopting for himself a method which has since become a rule of art, more

or less acknowledged in the literature of fiction, the poet dashes off

at once into the full action of his story. He does not ask his readers

or hearers to accompany the great armament over sea from the shores of

Greece, or give them the history of the long and weary siege. He plunges

at one leap into the tenth year of the war. He assumes from the outset,

on the part of those to whom he speaks, a general knowledge of the main

plot of his poem, and of the characters represented: just as the modern

author of a novel or a poem on the Civil Wars of England would assume

some general acquaintance with the history of Charles I., the character

of Cromwell, and the breach between King and Commons. Nine whole years

are supposed to have already passed in desultory warfare; but for the

details of these campaigns the modern reader has to go to other sources,

with which also the original hearers are supposed to have been

acquainted. The Trojans and their allies are cooped up within the walls

of their city, while the Greek hero Achilles has spread the terror of

his name far and wide.

The poet’s exordium is of the very briefest. His invocation to the

goddess of song is in just three words:--

“Sing, heavenly muse, the wrath of Peleus’ son.”

We have here the key-note of the poem brought before us in the very

first line--nay, in the very first word, according to the original, for

“wrath” stands first in the Greek, which it cannot very conveniently do

in the English. The two great heroes of the Greek chivalry, Agamemnon

and Achilles, always jealous of each other, come to an open quarrel in

full council of the princes of the League. Their quarrel is--like the

original cause of the war, like so many quarrels before and since--about

a woman, a beautiful captive. A fatal pestilence is raging in the camp.

The Sun-god, Apollo, is angry. To him and to his twin-sister Diana, the

Moon, all mysterious diseases were attributed--not without some

sufficient reasons, in a hot climate. Pestilence and disease were the

arrows of Apollo and Diana. Therefore the Greeks have no doubt as to the

author of the present calamity. It is “the god of the silver bow” who is

sending his swift shafts of death amongst them. The poet’s vision even

sees the dread Archer in bodily shape. It is a fine picture; the English

reader will lose little of its beauty in Lord Derby’s version:--

“Along Olympus’ heights he passed, his heart

Burning with wrath; behind his shoulders hung

His bow and ample quiver; at his back

Rattled the fateful arrows as he moved.

Like the night-cloud he passed, and from afar

He bent against the ships, and sped the bolt;

And fierce and deadly twanged the silver bow.

First on the mules and dogs, on man the last,

Was poured the arrowy storm; and through the camp

Constant and numerous blazed the funeral-fires.”

In their misery the Greeks appeal to their soothsayer Calchas, to divine

for them the cause of the god’s displeasure. The Mantis or soothsayer,

whose skill was in most cases supposed to be hereditary, accompanied a

Greek force on all its expeditions; and no prudent general would risk a

battle, or engage in any important enterprise, without first

ascertaining from this authority the will of the gods, as shadowed out

in certain appearances of the sacrifice, or some peculiarity in the

flight of birds, or some phenomena of the heavens. In this particular

expedition it would appear that Calchas had turned the last branch of

his art to good purpose; it must have been his knowledge of the stars

which had enabled him, as Homer tells us, to pilot the great fleet from

their own shores to Troy. He confesses that he can read the secret of

Apollo’s present wrath; but he hesitates to tell it, dreading, he says,

lest he should thereby anger the “great chief whom the whole host

obeys.” Achilles charges him to speak out boldly without fear or favour;

none shall harm him--not even if he should denounce Agamemnon himself as

the cause of this visitation, adds the hero, gladly seizing the

opportunity of hurling a defiance at his great rival. Thus supported,

the seer speaks out; Agamemnon is indeed the guilty cause. In a late

foray he had taken captive the maiden daughter of Chryses, a priest of

the Sun-god, and the father had come to the camp of the invaders as a

suppliant, pleading the sanctity of his office, and offering a fitting

ransom. The great king had refused to listen, had sent him away with

bitter words and threats; and the priest had prayed to his god to punish

the insult: hence the pestilence. Immediately the popular

voice--expressed loudly through Achilles--demands the maiden’s instant

restitution to her father. Agamemnon, though burning with indignation

alike against the seer and his champion, dares not refuse. His

prerogative, however generally admitted and respected by the confederate

army, is dependent in such extremities on the popular will. He promises

at once to send back the daughter of Chryses unharmed and without

ransom. But at the same time, after a stormy and bitter dispute with

Achilles, he announces his intention to insist on that chief resigning,

by way of exchange, a fair captive named Briseis, carried off in some

similar raid, who had been awarded to him as his share of the public

spoil. To this insolent demand the majority of the council of chiefs,

content with their victory on the main question, appear to raise no

objection. But Achilles--his impetuous nature roused to madness by the

studied insult--leaps up and half unsheathes his sword. Even then--such

is the Greek’s reverence for authority--he hesitates; and as he stands

with his hand upon the hilt, there sweeps down from Olympus[10] Pallas

Athene (Minerva), the goddess of wisdom, sent by Here (Juno) Queen of

Heaven to check this fatal strife between her favourite Greeks. The

celestial messenger is visible to Achilles alone. She calms the hero’s

wrath so far as to restrain him from any act of violence; but, as she

disappears, he turns on his enemy, and swears a mighty oath--the royal

oath of kings--by the golden-studded staff, or “sceptre,” which was

borne by king, priest, and judge as the emblem of their authority.

Pope’s rendering has all the fire of the original, and the additional

touches which he throws in are at least in a kindred spirit:--

“By this I swear, when bleeding Greece again

Shall call Achilles, she shall call in vain:

When flushed with slaughter Hector comes to spread

The purpled shore with mountains of the dead,

Then shalt thou mourn th’ affront thy madness gave,

Forced to deplore, when impotent to save;

Then rage in bitterness of soul, to know

This act has made the bravest Greek thy foe.”

He dashes his sceptre on the ground, and sits down in savage silence.

Agamemnon is ready enough to return the taunt, when there rises in the

assembly a venerable figure, whose grey hairs and tried sagacity in

council command at once the respect of all. It is Nestor, the

hoary-headed chieftain of the rocky Pylos in the Peloponnese--known in

his more vigorous days as “the horse-tamer,” and, in sooth, not a little

proud of his past exploits. Two generations of men he has already

outlived in his own dominions, and is now loved and respected by the

third. He has joined the great armament still sound in wind and limb;

but he is valued now not so much for his

“Red hand in the foray,”

as for his

“Sage counsel in cumber.”

He can clothe this counsel, too, in winning words. The stream of

eloquence that flowed from his lips, says the poet, was “sweeter than

honey.” He gently reproves both disputants for their unseemly strife--a

shame to the Greeks, a triumph to the enemy. His words ring like the

lament of David over the suicide of Saul--“Tell it not in Gath, publish

it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines

rejoice.”

“Alas, deep sorrow on our land doth fall!

Yet shall on Priam and his sons alight

Hope, and a great joy on the Trojans all,

Hearing ye waste in bitter feud your might,

Ye twain, our best in counsel and in fight.” (W.)

He proceeds to tell them something of his own long experience, by way of

claim on their attention--with something also, as critics have noticed,

of an old man’s garrulity. But the reader, it should be remembered,

really wants to know something about him, even if the Greeks may have

been supposed to have heard his story before.

“In times past

I lived with men--and they despised me not--

Abler in counsel, greater than yourselves.

Such men I never saw and ne’er shall see,

As Pirithous and Dryas, wise and brave,

And Theseus, Œgeus’ more than mortal son.

The mightiest they among the sons of men,

The mightiest they, and of the forest beasts

Strove with the mightiest, and their rage subdued.

With them I played my part; with them, not one

Would dare to fight of mortals now on earth.

Yet they my counsels heard, my voice obeyed;

And hear ye also--for my words are wise.” (D.)

The angry chiefs do hear him so far, that after the interchange of a few

more passionate words they leave the council. Achilles stalks off

gloomily to his tent, accompanied by his faithful friend and henchman,

Patroclus (of whom we shall hear more), and followed by his retinue.

Agamemnon proceeds at once to carry out his resolution. He despatches a

galley with a trusty crew, under the command of the sage Ulysses, to the

island of Chrysa, to restore the old priest’s daughter to him in all

honour, with expiatory presents, and the offer of a hecatomb to the

Sun-god. They make the voyage quickly, and arrive safely at the island.

The rapid movement here of Homer’s verse has rarely been more happily

rendered than in the English hexameters of Mr Landon:--

“Out were the anchors cast, and the ropes made fast to the steerage;

Out did the sailors leap on the foaming beach of the ocean;

Out was the hecatomb led for the skilful marksman Apollo;

Out Chryseis arose from the ship that sped through the waters.”

So, by the good priest’s prayers, the god is propitiated, and the plague

in the Greek host is stayed.

Meanwhile another embassy, on a very different errand, has been

despatched by the King of Men to the tents where Achilles lies, hard by

his ships, with his fierce bands of Myrmidons encamped around him. Their

name has passed into a by-word, being commonly but incorrectly used to

designate an unscrupulous rabble of followers, to whom their leader’s

word is law. The notion must be derived not from Homer, but from Pope.

In his version of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, he makes

the former say to his antagonist--

“Go, threat thine earth-born Myrmidons; but here

’Tis mine to threaten, prince, and thine to fear.”

But to suppose that the Myrmidons were subservient to any man’s threats,

is to give them a very different character from what we find in Homer.

Even the epithet “earth-born,” which is Pope’s, not Homer’s, and which

may easily be misunderstood, they would have prized as a high

compliment, implying that they were no new race, but the aboriginal

possessors of their native soil; just as the proud Athenians wore the

“golden grasshopper” in their hair, because that insect was fabled to

owe its birth to the spontaneous action of the earth. The followers of

Achilles were indeed “fierce as ravening wolves,” as the poet has

afterwards described them; but they were the very flower of the Greek

army, troops of whom any leader might be proud, and if they had a

wolfish thirst for blood, they were no worse and no better in this

respect than Achilles himself, or any captain in the host before Troy;

for an insatiable ferocity, when once the spirit of combativeness is

aroused, is the characteristic of all Homer’s heroes, as in those of the

medieval romances.

The purpose of the king’s embassy to Achilles is, of course, in

pursuance of his threat, to demand the surrender of the fair Briseis.

Such a message to such a man is no very safe or agreeable errand. But

Agamemnon chooses his envoys well. He sends two heralds--Eurybates and

Talthybius. The herald’s office, in early Greek warfare, had an especial

sanctity. Those who held it were not mere officials whose name protected

them, but men of noble and even of royal birth, who might have been

captains of thousands themselves, if they had not chosen, as it were,

the civilian’s place in warfare. Such diplomacy as there was room for

in those ages was transacted by them. They were under the special

protection of Zeus, as the god of oaths and treaties. There was no fear

that the noble chief of the Myrmidons, even in his most furious mood,

would treat such envoys rudely. But in fact his reception of them is one

of the most remarkable scenes in the poem, both from its high-toned

courtesy and from its strong contrast with the hero’s previous bearing

towards Agamemnon. Achilles receives the heralds of the king much as a

well-bred gentleman of fifty years ago would have received the “friend”

who carried a hostile message from one with whom he had a deadly quarrel

a few hours before. The demand which they brought from Agamemnon was

pointed with the additional threat that, if he refused to give up the

damsel, the king would come himself and carry her off by the strong

hand,--a threat almost brutal, because quite unwarranted; since Achilles

had declared in the council that if the Greeks, who had awarded her as

his battle-prize, chose to acquiesce in the injustice of demanding her

back from him, _he_ should make no resistance. But it does not seem that

the heralds delivered themselves of the additional insult which they

were charged to convey. They had no need. As they stand at the entrance

of his tent, “troubled and awe-stricken,” loath to begin their unwelcome

tale, Achilles sets them at their ease at once in a few calm and

dignified words. He recognises in them “the messengers of Zeus”--and if

now by accident of Agamemnon, the offence is his, not theirs. He at once

bids Patroclus lead forth the damsel, and gives her into their custody,

to deal with according to their orders. He repeats his oath, however,

though in calmer terms; and calls them to witness before heaven that

Agamemnon, in his day of need, shall look in vain for the saving arm of

the man he has insulted.

It is something in favour of a tender side to the hero’s character, that

the “fair-cheeked” Briseis, spoil of war though she was, parts from him

very reluctantly. Achilles, for his share, fairly weeps: but not the

most romantic reader of the story dares nurse the idea that it is for

his Briseis. They who bring with them, to the pages of classical

fiction, a taste which has been built up by modern song and romance,

must be warned at once that there is no love-story in either Iliad or

Odyssey. Indeed, one remarkable point of difference between the

imaginative writers of antiquity and those of our own days, lies in the

absence of that which is the motive and the key-note of five-sixths of

our modern tales in prose and verse. Love between unmarried persons, in

the sense in which we commonly use the word, seems very much the product

of modern civilisation. There is indeed a passion which we name by the

same English word--the mere animal passion, which Homer, to do him

justice, deals with but as a matter of fact, and never paints in

attractive colours. There is again a love of another kind--the love of

the husband for his wife and of the wife for her husband--which the old

poet also well understood, and which furnishes him with scenes of the

highest pathos and beauty. But as to the sentiment which forms the

common staple of modern romance and drama, Homer certainly did not know

what it meant, nor Achilles or Briseis either. As for the latter, if she

shed tears, it was no doubt because she had found in Achilles a kind

and generous lord and master, who had made her captive lot (which might

chance to come to the turn of any lady or princess in those warlike

times) as tolerable as such a life could be; and because Agamemnon--if

she had heard his character from Achilles--did not promise a very

favourable change in that respect.

Achilles weeps--but not for Briseis. He is touched in a point where he

is far more sensitive--his honour. He has been robbed of the guerdon of

valour, bestowed on him in full conclave of the chiefs of the army. He

has been robbed of it by Agamemnon--the man for whose especial sake, to

avenge whose family wrongs, he has come on this long expedition from his

home. This was his indignant protest in their dispute at the council--

“Well dost thou know that ’twas no feud of mine

With Troy’s brave sons, that brought me here in arms;

They never did me wrong; they never drove

My cattle, or my horses; never sought

In Phthia’s fertile life-sustaining fields

To waste the crops; for wide between us lay

The shadowy mountains and the roaring sea.

With thee, O void of shame! with thee we sailed,

For Menelaüs and for thee, ingrate,

Glory and fame on Trojan crests to win.” (D.)

And now this is his reward! And the whole Greek army, too, have made

themselves partakers in the wrong, inasmuch as they have tamely looked

on, and allowed the haughty king thus to override honour, gratitude, and

justice. His indignation is intense. He wanders away, and sits alone on

the sea-beach, “gazing vacantly on the illimitable ocean.” Soon there

comes a change upon his spirit; and now, with a childlike

petulance--these Homeric heroes, with all their fierce ways, are still

so very childlike, and therefore so human and so interesting--he cries

to his mother. True, that mother is, as we remember, a goddess--Thetis,

daughter of the great Jupiter, and of potent influence in the waters

beneath the earth. To her he bemoans himself. That his days were to be

few, he knew when he came here to Troy; but she had promised him undying

renown. It has failed him: his “one crowded hour of glorious life” is

darkened in dishonour. He cries, and his goddess-mother hears him--

“Beside her aged father where she sat,

In the deep ocean-caves.”

It is the original of our own Milton’s beautiful invocation in

Comus--the rough simple outline on which he has painted with a grace and

fulness which make it all his own--

“Sabrina fair!

Listen, where thou art sitting

Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,

In twisted braids of lilies knitting

The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair;

Listen for dear honour’s sake,

Goddess of the silver lake,

Listen, and save!”

Thetis hears, and rises on the sea--“like as it were a mist”--(the

“White Lady of Avenel”) caresses him soothingly with her hand, as though

the stalwart warrior were still a child indeed, and asks him the simple

question which all mothers, goddesses or not, would put into much the

same words--“My son, why weepest thou?” He tells his tale of wrong; and

she proceeds to give him, in the first place, advice certainly not wiser

than that of some earthly mothers. She does not advise him to make up

his quarrel with Agamemnon, but to nurse his wrath, and withdraw

himself wholly from the siege. She, meanwhile, will intercede with

Jupiter, and beseech him to grant the Trojans victory for a while, that

so the Greeks may learn to feel the loss of the hero whom they have

insulted.

There is an obstacle, however, in the way of the immediate performance

of her promise--a ludicrous obstacle, to our modern taste, though the

poet does not so intend it. The King of the Gods has gone out to

dinner--or rather to a continuous festival of twelve days, to which he

has been invited by “the blameless Ethiopians;”[11] a race with whom the

Immortals of Olympus have some mysterious connection, which has been

held to imply an Eastern origin for the Greek religion and race. With

the dawn of the twelfth morning, however, Thetis presents herself in the

“brazen-floored” halls of Jupiter, and we are introduced to the Olympian

court and household. A strange picture it is--such a travesty of a

divine life as makes us wonder what the poet himself really conceived of

the gods of his adoption. The life of mortal heroes in the world below

is grandeur and nobleness itself compared with that of the Olympian

heaven. Its pleasures indeed are much the same--those of sensual

gratification; the feast, the wine-cup, music and song, are what gods

and goddesses delight in as much as those whom the poet pathetically

calls “the creatures of a day.” But all their passions are incomparably

meaner. The wrath of Achilles is dignified--Juno’s anger against Troy

is mere vicious spite. The subtle craft of Ulysses is at least exercised

for the benefit of his countrymen and their cause; but the shifty

counsels of Jupiter are the mere expedients of a cunning despot who,

between queen and ministers and favourites, finds it difficult, in spite

of his despotism, to have his own way. The quarrel between Agamemnon and

Achilles is tragedy: the domestic wrangles of the Thunderer and his

queen are in the very spirit of low comedy, and not even the burlesques

of Life in Olympus, which some years ago were popular on our English

stage, went far beyond the recognised legends of mythology. In fact, the

comic element, what little there is of it in the Iliad, is supplied

(with the single exception of the incident of Thersites) by the powers

whom the poet recognises as divinities. The idea of rival wills and

influences existing in the supernatural world led the poet necessarily

to represent his gods as quarrelling; and quarrels in a primitive age

are perhaps hardly compatible with dignity. But the conception of gods

in human shape has always a tendency to monstrosities and caricature.

How close, too, the supernatural and the grotesque seem to lie together

may be seen even in the existing sculptures and carvings of ancient

Christendom, and still more remarkably in the old Miracle-Plays, which

mix buffoonery with the most sacred subjects in a manner which it is

hard to reconcile with any real feeling of reverence.

Thetis throws herself at the feet of her father Jupiter, and begs of

him, as a personal favour, the temporary humiliation of Agamemnon and

his Greeks. For a while the Thunderer is silent, and hesitates; Thetis

perseveringly clings to his knees. At last he confides to her his dread

lest a compliance with her petition should involve him in domestic

difficulties.

“Sad work thou mak’st, in bidding me oppose

My will to Juno’s, when her bitter words

Assail me, for full oft amid the gods

She taunts me that I aid the Trojan cause.

But thou return--_that Juno see thee not_--

And leave to me the furtherance of thy suit.” (D.)

He pledges his promise to her, and ratifies it with the mighty nod that

shakes Olympus--a solemn confirmation which made his word irrevocable.

“Waved on th’ immortal head th’ ambrosial locks,

And all Olympus trembled at his nod.”

Critics have somewhat over-praised the grandeur of the image; but it is

said that the great sculptor Phidias referred to it as having furnished

him with the idea of his noble statue of Olympian Jove. Satisfied with

her success, Thetis plunges down from high Olympus into the sea, and the

Thunderer proceeds to take his place in full council of the gods, as

calm as if nothing had happened. But there are watchful eyes about him

which he has not escaped. Juno has been a witness of the interview, and

has a shrewd suspicion of its object. A connubial dialogue ensues,

which, though the poet has thought fit to transfer the scene of it to

Olympus, is of an exceedingly earthly, and what we should now call

“realistic,” type. Homer’s recognised translators have not condescended

to give it the homely tone of the original. Pope is grandiloquent, and

Lord Derby calmly dignified; but Homer intends to be neither. Mr

Gladstone’s translation comes nearest the spirit of the Greek. The

brief encounter between the king and queen of the Immortals is cut short

by the former in rather summary fashion. “Thou hast been promising

honour to Achilles, I trow,” says Juno.

“Zeus that rolls the clouds of heaven her addressing answered then;

‘Moonstruck! thou art ever _trowing_; never I escape thy ken.

After all, it boots thee nothing; leaves thee of my heart the less:

So thou hast the worser bargain. What if I the fact confess?

It was done because I willed it. Hold thy peace--my word obey,

Lest, if I come near, and on thee these unconquered hands I lay,

All the gods that hold Olympus nought avail thee here to-day.’”[12]

He bids her, in very plain Greek, sit down and hold her tongue; and

gives her clearly to understand--with a threat of violence which is an

unusual addition to his many failings as a husband--that it is his fixed

intention, on this occasion, to be lord and master, not only of Olympus,

but of his wife. Juno is silenced, and the whole assembly of the gods is

startled by the Thunderer’s violence. Vulcan, the fire-god--the lame

brawny hunchback, always more or less the jester and the butt of the

court of Olympus, but with more brains in his head than most of his

straight-limbed compeers--Vulcan comes to the general relief. He soothes

his royal mother by the argument, that it were ill indeed to break the

peace of heaven for the sake of two or three wretched mortals: and he

reminds her--we must suppose in an aside--that they both knew by bitter

experience that when the father of gods and men _did_ choose to put

forth his might, it went hard with all who resisted.

“When to thy succour once before I came,

He seized me by the foot, and hurled me down

From heaven’s high threshold; all the day I fell,

And with the setting sun on Lemnos’ isle

Lighted, scarce half-alive; there was I found,

And by the Sintian people kindly nursed.” (D.)

He gives the mother-goddess further comfort--in “a double cup,” which he

proceeds also to hand round the whole of the august circle. They quaff

their nectar with unusual zest, as they break into peals of laughter (it

must be confessed, rather ungratefully) at the hobbling gait and awkward

attentions of their new cup-bearer:--

“Thus they till sunset passed the festive hours;

Nor lacked the banquet aught to please the sense,

Nor sound of tuneful lyre by Phœbus touched,

Nor Muses’ voice, who in alternate strains

Responsive sung; but when the sun had set

Each to his home departed, where for each

The crippled Vulcan, matchless architect,

With wondrous skill a noble house had reared.”

And so, at the end of the first book of the poem, the curtain falls on

the Olympian happy family.

But Jupiter has but a wakeful night. He is planning how he may best

carry out his promise to Thetis. He sends a lying spirit in a dream to

Agamemnon at midnight. The vision stands at the head of the king’s

couch, taking the shape of old Nestor. In this character it encourages

him to muster all his forces to storm the city of Troy on the morrow.

Now, at last, the false phantom assures him, its walls are doomed to

fall; the strife in heaven is ended; Juno’s counsels have prevailed, and

the fate of Troy is sealed irrevocably.

Joyfully the King of Men arises from his sleep, and summons at daybreak

a council of the chiefs. Already, says the poet, he storms and sacks the

royal city in imagination, little foreseeing the long and bloody

struggle that lies yet between him and his prey. In the council he

invents a stratagem of his own, which complicates the story considerably

without improving it. He suspects the temper of his army; and before he

makes up his mind to lead them to the assault, he seeks to ascertain

whether or no the long ten years’ siege has worn out their patience and

broken their spirit. He will try the dangerous experiment of proposing

to them to break up the siege and embark at once for home. He himself

will make the proposal to the whole army; the other leaders, for their

part, are to oppose such a base retreat, and urge their followers to

make yet another effort for the national honour of Greece.

The clans, at the summons of their several chiefs, muster in their

thousands from tents and ships; and Agamemnon, seated on his throne of

state, the immortal sceptre in his hand, harangues them in accordance

with his preconcerted stratagem. He paints in lively colours the

weariness of the nine years’ siege, his own disappointed hopes, the

painful yearning of their long-deserted wives and children for the

return of their husbands and fathers; and ends by proposing an immediate

re-embarkation for home. He plays his part only too successfully. The

immense host heaves and sways with excitement at his words--“like the

long waves of the Icarian Sea, like the deep tall corn-crop as the

summer wind sweeps over it”--and with tumultuous shouts of exultation

they rush down to their galleys and begin at once to launch them; so

little regard have the multitude for glory, so strong is their yearning

for home. It is possible that the poet is no unconscious satirist, and

that he willingly allowed his hearers to draw, if they pleased, the

inference which he hints in more than one passage, that war is the sport

of princes, for which the masses pay the cost.

But Juno’s ever-watchful eyes have marked the movement. Again Minerva is

her messenger, and shoots down from Olympus to stop this disgraceful

flight. She addresses herself to the ear of the sage Ulysses, who knows

her voice at once. Wisdom speaks to the wise,--if any reader prefers the

moral allegory to the simple fiction. Ulysses is standing fixed in

disgust and despair at the cowardice of his countrymen. The goddess bids

him use all his eloquence to check their flight. Without a word he

flings off his cloak,[13] and meeting Agamemnon, receives the immortal

sceptre from his hand, and armed with this staff of authority rushes

down to the galleys. Any king or chieftain whom he encounters he hastily

reminds of the secret understanding which had been the result of the

previous council, and urges them, at least, to set a braver example. To

the plebeian crowd he uses argument of another kind. He applies the

royal sceptre to them in one of its primitive uses, as a rod of

correction, and bids them wait for orders from their superiors. Easily

swayed to either course, the crowd are awed into quiet by his energetic

remonstrances. One popular orator alone lifts his well-known voice

loudly in defiance. It is a certain Thersites, of whom the poet gives a

sketch, brief enough, but with so many marks of individuality, that we

may be justified in looking at him as a character drawn from life.

“The ugliest man was he who came to Troy,

With squinting eyes and one distorted foot,

His shoulders round, and buried in his breast

His narrow head with scanty growth of hair.”

His talent lies in speaking evil of dignities--a talent which, no doubt,

he had found popular enough in some circles of camp society, though all

the respectable Greeks, we are assured, are shocked at him. He launches

out now with bitter virulence--in which there is nevertheless (as in

most oratory of the kind) a certain amount of truth--against Agamemnon.

He denounces his greed, his selfishness, his disregard of the sufferings

of his troops, his late treatment of Achilles; they must all be cowards,

he says, to obey such a leader--

“Women of Greece! I will not call ye men!”

Why not sail home at once, and leave him, if he can, to take Troy with

his own single hand?

The mutineer speaks in an evil hour for himself, this time; for Ulysses

hears him. That energetic chief answers him in terms as strong as his

own, and warns him that if he should catch him again railing in like

fashion--“taking the name of kings in his abusive mouth”--he will strip

his garments from him, and flog him naked back to the ships. And, as an

earnest of his promise, he lays the mighty sceptre heavily on his back

and shoulders. Such prompt and vigorous chastisement meets the popular

humour at once; and as the hunchback writhes and howls under the blows,

the fickle feelings of the Greeks break forth in peals of laughter. “Of

the many good things Ulysses has done, this last,” they swear, “is the

best of all.”

Then, prompted still by the goddess of Wisdom, Ulysses harangues the

reassembled troops. He reminds them of their plighted oath of service to

Agamemnon, of the encouraging oracles of heaven, of the disgrace of

returning home from an unaccomplished errand. With the art of a true

orator, he sympathises with their late feelings--it _is_ bitter for them

all, indeed, to waste so many years on a foreign shore, far from home,

and wife, and children; but bitterest of all would it be

“Long to remain, and bootless to return.”

The venerable Nestor speaks to the same effect; and Agamemnon himself

closes the debate with a call to immediate battle. It is a right royal

speech, far more worthy of a true “king of men” than his former

philippics--moderate in his allusion to Achilles, spirited in his appeal

to his warriors.

“Come but new friendship, and our feud destroy,

Then from the evil that is fixed and sealed

Not one day’s respite shall be left to Troy--

But now to dinner, ere we take the field;

Let each his spear whet, and prepare his shield,

Feed well the horses, and each chariot test,

That we may fight it out till one side yield,

Fight in sound harness, and not think of rest,

Till the black night decide it as to Zeus seems best.

“Then shall the horses in their foam be wet,

While forward in the glittering car they strain;

Then shall the straps of the broad buckler sweat

Round many a breast there battling in the plain;

Then shall the arm droop, hurling spears with pain:

And whomsoever I behold at lair

Here by the ships, and for the fight not fain,

Small for that skulker is the hope, I swear,

But that the dogs he fatten and the fowls of air.” (W.)

He remembers, too, like a wise general, that a battle may be lost by

fighting on an empty stomach. So the oxen and the fatlings are slain,

the choice pieces of the thighs and the fat are offered in sacrifice to

the gods, and then the whole army feasts their fill. Agamemnon holds a

select banquet of six of the chief leaders--King Idomeneus of Crete,

Nestor, Ajax the Greater and the Less, and Ulysses, “wise in council as

Zeus.” One guest comes uninvited--his brother Menelaus. He is no

dinner-loving intruder; he comes, as the poet simply tells us, “because

he knew in his heart how many were his brother’s cares and

anxieties,”--he might be of some use or support to him. Throughout the

whole of the poem, the mutual affection borne by these two brothers is

very remarkable, and unlike any type of the same relationship which

exists in fiction. It is never put forward or specially dwelt upon, but

comes out simply and naturally in every particular of their intercourse.

A king and priest, like Abraham at Bethel, Agamemnon stands by his

burnt-offering, and lifts his prayer for victory to Jupiter, “most

glorious and most great, who dwells in the clouds and thick darkness.”

But no favourable omen comes from heaven. The god, whether or no he

accepts the offering, gives no sign. Nevertheless--we may suppose with a

certain wilfulness which is part of his character--Agamemnon proceeds to

set the battle in array; and the second book of the Iliad closes with

the long muster-roll of the Greek clans under their respective kings or

chiefs on the one side, and of the Trojans and their allies on the

other, which in our introduction has already been partly

anticipated.[14] The long list of chiefs, with their genealogies and

birthplaces, and the strength of their several contingents, was

evidently composed with a view to recitation: and whatever may be its

value as an authentic record, we can understand the interest with which

a Greek audience would listen to a muster-roll which was to them what

the Roll of Battle Abbey was to the descendants of the Normans in

England. If here and there, upon occasion, the wandering minstrel

inserted in the text the name and lineage of some provincial hero on his

own responsibility, the popular applause would assuredly be none the

less.

CHAPTER II.

THE DUEL OF PARIS AND MENELAUS.

The battle is set in array, “army against army.” But there is a

difference in the bearing of the opposed forces which is very

significant, and is probably a note of real character, not a mere stroke

of the poet’s art. The Trojan host, after the fashion of Asiatic

warfare, modern as well as ancient, move forward to the combat with loud

shouts and clashing of weapons. The poet compares their confused clamour

to the noise of a flock of cranes on their annual migration. The Greeks,

on the other hand, march in silence, with closed ranks, uttering no

sound, but “breathing determination.” So, when afterwards they actually

close for action, not a sound is heard in their ranks but the voice of

the leaders giving the word of command. “You would not think,” says the

poet, “that all that mighty host had tongues;” while, in the mixed

battalions of the enemy, whose allies are men of many lands and

languages, there arises a noisy discordant clamour--“like as of bleating

ewes that hear the cries of their lambs.”

But while the hostile forces yet await the signal for the battle, Paris

springs forth alone from the Trojan ranks. “Godlike” he is in his

beauty, and with the leve of personal adornment which befits his

character, he wears a spotted leopard’s hide upon his shoulders.

Tennyson’s portrait of him, though in a different scene, is thoroughly

Homeric--

“White-breasted like a star,

Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard’s skin

Drooped from his shoulder, but his sunny hair

Clustered about his temples like a god’s.”

Advancing with long strides in the space between the armies, he

challenges the leaders of the Greeks, one and all, to meet him singly in

mortal combat. Menelaus hears the boast. “Like a hungry lion springing

on his prey,” he leaps full-armed from his chariot, exulting in the

thought that now at last his personal vengeance shall be gratified. But

conscience makes a coward of Paris. He starts back--“as a man that sees

a serpent in his path”--the godlike visage grows pale, the knees

tremble, and the Trojan champion draws back under the shelter of his

friends from the gallant hero whom he has so bitterly wronged. The Roman

historian Livy--a poet in prose--had surely this passage in his mind

when he described Sextus Tarquinius, the dishonourer of Lucretia,

quailing, as no Roman of his blood and rank would otherwise have

quailed, when young Valerius dashes out from the Roman lines to engage

him. The moral teaching of the heathen poet on such points is far higher

than that of the medieval romancers with whom he has so many points in

common. Sir Tristram of Lyonnois has no such scruples of conscience in

meeting King Mark. Lancelot, indeed, will not fight with Arthur; but the

very nobility of character with which the unknown author of that

striking impersonation has endowed him is in itself the highest of all

wrongs against morality, in that it steals the reader’s sympathies for

the wrong-doer instead of for the injured husband. Shakespeare, as is

his wont, strikes the higher key. It is the consciousness of guilt which

makes Macbeth half quail before Macduff--

“Of all men else have I avoided thee:

But get thee back--my soul is too much charged

With blood of thine already.

...I will not fight with thee.”

Paris withdraws into the Trojan ranks, and there encounters Hector. As

has been already said, the poet assumes at the outset, on the part of

his audience, at least such knowledge of his _dramatis personæ_ as to

make a formal introduction unnecessary. Hector is the noblest of all the

sons of Priam, the shield and bulwark of his countrymen throughout the

long years of the war. Achilles is the hero of the Iliad, and to him

Homer assigns the palm of strength and valour; but, as is not seldom the

case in fiction, the author has painted the rival hero so well that our

sympathies are at least as frequently found on his side. We almost share

Juno’s feelings against the Trojans when they are represented by Paris;

but when Hector comes into the field, our hearts half go over to the

enemy. His character will be touched upon more fully hereafter: for the

present, it must discover itself in the course of the story. He throws

himself in the way of Paris in his cowardly retreat; and in spite of the

fraternal feeling which is so remarkably strong amongst Homer’s

heroes,--in Hector and his brothers almost as much as in Agamemnon and

Menelaus,--shame and disgust at his present poltroonery now mingle

themselves with a righteous hatred of the selfish lust which has

plunged his country into a bloody war--

“Was it for this, or with such heart as now,

O’er the wide billows with a chosen band

Thou sailedst, and with violated vow

Didst bring thy fair wife from the Apian strand,

Torn from the house of men of warlike hand,

And a great sorrow for thy father’s head,

Troy town, and all the people of the land,

By thine inhospitable offence hast bred,

Thus for the enemy’s sport, thine own confusion dread?

“Lo, now thou cowerest, and wilt not abide

Fierce Menelaus--thou hadst known, I ween,

Soon of what man thou hast the blooming bride!

Poor had the profit of thy harp then been,

Vain Aphrodite’s gifts, thy hair, thy mien,

He mangling in the dust thy fallen brow.

But there is no wrong to the Trojans keen,

And they are lambs in Spirit; or else hadst thou

Worn, for thine evil works, a cloke of stone ere now.” W.

Paris has the grace to admit the justice of his brother’s rebuke.

Hector, he confesses, is far the better soldier; only he pleads, with a

self-complacency which he never loses, that grace of person, and a

smooth tongue, and a taste for music, are nothing less than the gifts of

the gods--that, in fact, it is not his fault that he is so irresistible.

He ends, however, with an offer which is far more to Hector’s mind. Let

open lists be pitched in sight of both armies, and he will engage

Menelaus in single combat; Helen and her wealth shall be the prize of

victory.

It is a proposal at which Hector’s heart rejoices. He checks at once the

advancing line of the Trojans, and steps out himself to the front. The

Greeks bend their bows at him, but Agamemnon understands his motions,

and bids them hold their hands. It is a fair challenge which the Trojan

prince comes to make on behalf of Paris. Menelaus accepts it, in a few

plain and gallant words--he is no orator:--

“Hear now my answer; in this quarrel I

May claim the chiefest share; and now I hope

Trojans and Greeks may see the final close

Of all the labours ye so long have borne,

T’ avenge my wrong at Paris’ hand sustained.

And of us two whiche’er is doomed to death,

So let him die! the rest depart in peace.” (D.)

A truce is agreed upon, to abide the result of this appeal of battle. A

messenger from Olympus--Iris, goddess of the Rainbow--comes to warn

Helen of the impending duel. And this introduces one of the most

beautiful passages in the whole Iliad, to modern taste. Its sentiment

and pathos are perfectly level and quiet; but as a natural and life-like

yet highly-wrought portrait of a scene in what we may call the social

drama, it stands almost without equal or parallel in classical

literature.

Helen--the fatal cause of the war, the object of such violent passions

and such bitter taunts--is sitting pensively in the palace of her royal

father-in-law, writing her own miserable story. She is writing it--not

in a three-volumed novel, as a lady who had a private history, more or

less creditable, would write it now, but--in a golden tapestry, in which

more laborious form it was in those days not unfrequent to write

sensational biographies. Iris urges her to be present at the show. The

whole reads like the tale of some medieval tournament, except that Helen

herself is the prize of victory as well as the Queen of Beauty. Attended

by her maidens, she goes down to the place where the aged Priam, like

the kings of the Old Testament history, “sits in the gate” surrounded

by the elders of his city. It is the “Scæan,” or “left-hand” gate, which

opens towards the camp of the enemy, and commands a view of their lines.

We have had no word as yet of the marvellous beauty of Helen. There is

no attempt to describe it throughout the whole of the poem. But here, in

a few masterly touches, introduced in the simplest and most natural

manner, Homer does more than describe it, when he tells us its effects.

The old men break off their talk as the beautiful stranger draws near.

They had seen her often enough before; the fatal face and form must have

been well known in the streets and palaces of Troy, however retired a

life Helen might well have thought it becoming in her unhappy position

to lead. But the fair vision comes upon their eyes with a new and

ever-increasing enchantment. They say each to the other as they look

upon her, “It is no blame to Greeks or Trojans to fight for such a

woman--she is worth all the ten years of war; still, let her embark and

go home, lest we and our children suffer more for her.” Even the

earliest critics, when the finer shades of criticism were little

understood, were forcibly struck with the art of the poet in selecting

his witnesses for the defence. The Roman Quintilian had said nearly all

that modern taste has since confirmed. He bids the reader mark who gives

this testimony to Helen’s charms. Not the infatuated Paris, who has set

his own honour and his country’s welfare at nought for the sake of an

unlawful passion; not some young Trojan, who might naturally be ready to

vow “the world well lost” for such a woman; nor yet any of the vulgar

crowd, easily impressed, and always extravagant in its praise or blame;

but these grave and reverend seniors, men of cold passions and calm

judgment, fathers whose sons were fighting and falling for this woman’s

sake, and even Priam himself, whose very crown and kingdom she had

brought in deadly peril. He receives her, as she draws near, with gentle

courtesy. Plainly, in his estimation, her unhappy position does not

involve necessarily shame or disgrace. This opens one of the difficult

questions of the moral doctrine of the Iliad, which can only be

understood by bearing in mind the supernatural machinery of the poem. To

the modern reader, the character of Helen, and the light in which she is

regarded alike by Greeks and Trojans, present an anomaly in morals which

is highly unsatisfactory. It is not as if Homer, like the worst writers

of the Italian school, set marriage vows at nought, and made a jest of

unchastity. Far otherwise; the heathen bard on such points took an

infinitely higher tone than many so-called Christian poets. The

difficulty lies in the fact that throughout the poem, while the crime is

reprobated, the criminal meets with forbearance, and even sympathy. Our

first natural impulse with regard to Helen is to look upon her much in

the light in which she herself, in one of her bitter confessions, says

she is looked upon by the mass of the Trojans:--

“Throughout wide Troy I see no friendly eye,

And Trojans shudder as I pass them by.”

But this feeling, we must remember, arose much more from her being the

cause of all the miseries of the siege, than from her having left her

Greek husband. Priam and Hector--who have certainly not a lower

morality, and a higher nobility and unselfishness, than the mass of

their countrymen--show no such feeling against her; on the contrary,

they treat her with scrupulous delicacy and consideration. So also the

leaders of the Greek forces betray no consciousness that they are

fighting, after all, for a worthless woman; rather, she is a prize to be

reclaimed, and Menelaus himself is ready from the first to receive her

back again. How is this? Some have understood the poet to represent her

abduction from her home to have been forcible--that she was carried off

by Paris entirely against her will; but even allowing this (which is not

consistent with many passages in the poem), it would not excuse or

palliate her voluntary acceptance of such a degraded position throughout

the subsequent story. The real explanation is given in a few words by

Priam in the scene before us.

“Not thee I blame,

But to the gods I owe this woful war.”

In Homer’s sight, as in Priam’s, she is the victim of Venus. She is “the

victim of passion,” only in a more literal and personal sense than we

use the expression. Love, lawful or unlawful, was a divine--that is, a

supernatural--force, to the mind of the poet. The spells of Venus are

irresistible: that fatal gift of beauty is the right by which the

goddess takes possession of her, and leads her captive at her evil will.

Helen herself feels her own degradation far more deeply, in fact, than

any one else seems to feel it; no one uses any expressions about her

half so bitter as those which she applies to herself; “shameless,”

“bringer of sorrow,” “whose name shall be a by-word and a reproach,” are

the terms she uses--

“Oh that the day my mother gave me birth,

Some storm had on the mountains cast me forth!”

We must judge Homer’s characters with reference to the light of his

religious creed--if creed it were--or at least with reference to the

supernatural element employed in the Iliad. We shall be safe, then, in

seeing Helen through Homer’s eyes. We separate her unconsciously, as he

does, from her fault. Look upon that as the poet does, as she does

herself, as Priam and Hector and Menelaus do, as her fate, her

misfortune, the weird that she has been doomed to dree,--and then, what

a graceful womanly character remains! Gentle and daughterlike to the

aged Priam, humble and tearful in the presence of her noble and generous

brother-in-law Hector, as disdainful as she dares to be to her ignoble

lord and lover,--tender, respectful, regretful, towards the gallant

husband she has deserted.

So she comes in all her grace and beauty, and takes her seat by the old

King’s side upon the watch-tower, looking out upon the camp of the

Greeks. He bids her tell him the names of such of the kings and chiefs

as she can recognise. One there is who seems indeed a “king of men,” by

the grace of nature. There are taller warriors in the host; but none of

such majestic mien and right royal bearing. It is, indeed, Agamemnon the

son of Atreus, as Helen informs him,--

“Wide-reigning, mighty monarch, ruler good,

And valiant warrior; in my husband’s name,

Lost as I am, I called him brother once.”

Another chief attracts Priam’s attention, as he strides along in front

of the lines. Less in stature than Agamemnon, he is broader in the chest

and shoulders. Helen knows him well. It is Ulysses, son of Laertes,

“the man of many wiles;” nursed among the rugged cliffs of his island

kingdom of Ithaca, but already a traveller well versed in the ways of

men, the stratagems of war, and the counsels of princes. He is

recognised, too, now that Helen names him, by some of the Trojan elders;

for he, it must be remembered (and Homer assumes that we know it), had

accompanied Menelaus in the embassy to demand Helen’s restitution. Old

Antenor, now sitting by Priam’s side, well remembers the remarkable

stranger, whom he had lodged and entertained as a public guest. The

picture he draws of him is one of the most graphic and individual of all

Homer’s characters.

“For hither when on thine account to treat,

Brave Menelaus and Ulysses came,

I lodged them in my house, and loved them both,

And studied well the form and mind of each.

As they with Trojans mixed in social guise,

When both were standing, o’er his comrade high

With broad-set shoulders Menelaus stood:

Seated, Ulysses was the nobler form:

Then, in the great assembly, when to all

Their public speech and argument they framed,

In fluent language Menelaus spoke,

In words though few, yet clear; though young in years,

No wordy babbler, wasteful of his speech:

But when the skilled Ulysses rose to speak,

With downcast visage would he stand, his eyes

Bent on the ground; the staff he bore, nor back

He waved, nor forward, but like one untaught,

He held it motionless; who only saw,

Would say that he was mad, or void of sense:

But when his chest its deep-toned voice sent forth,

With words that fell like flakes of wintry snow,

No mortal with Ulysses could compare;

Then, little recked we of his outward show.” (D.)

A third hero catches the eye of the Trojan king, as well he may--a

leader like Saul, “taller by the head and shoulders than the rest

of the people”--and he asks Helen to name him also. This is Ajax of

Crete, son of Telamon, a giant chieftain, “the bulwark of the Greeks,”

represented here in the Iliad as easy-tempered and somewhat heavy, as

it is the wont of giants to be, degraded by medieval and modern poets

into a mere bulk without brains. “Mars’ idiot,” Shakespeare calls him,

“who has not so much wit as would stop the eye of Helen’s needle.”

Shirley, in his ‘Ajax and Ulysses,’ carries out the same popular

notion:--

“And now I look on Ajax Telamon,

I may compare him to some spacious building;

His body holds vast rooms of entertainment,

And lower parts maintain the offices;

Only the garret, his exalted head,

Useless for wise receipt, is filled with lumber.”

By the side of Ajax Helen also marks King Idomeneus of Crete, a frequent

guest in the palace of Menelaus in happier times; for the court of

Sparta, as will be seen hereafter in the Odyssey, was in these heroic

days a centre of civilisation and refinement. Two chiefs Helen’s anxious

eyes vainly try to discern amongst the crowd of her countrymen,--

“My own two brethren, and my mother’s sons,

Castor and Pollux; Castor, horseman bold,

Pollux, unmatched in pugilistic skill;

In Lacedæmon have they stayed behind?

Or can it be, in ocean-going ships

That they have come indeed, but shame to join

The fight of warriors, fearful of the shame

And deep disgrace that on my name attend?” (D.)

Helen’s self-reproachful surmises have not reached the truth. The “Great

Twin Brethren,” who had once already (so the ancient legend said)

rescued their beautiful sister in her girlhood from the hands of

Theseus, who had been amongst the mighty hunters of the Calydonian boar,

and had formed part of the adventurous crew of the Argo, had finished

their mortal warfare years before in a raid in Messenia; but to reappear

as demigods in Greek and Roman legend,--the spirit horsemen who rallied

the Roman line in the great fight with the Latins at the Lake Regillus,

the “shining stars” who lighted the sailors on the stormy Adriatic, and

gave their names to the ship in which St Paul was cast away.

“Back comes the chief in triumph,

Who, in the hour of fight,

Hath seen the Great Twin Brethren

In harness on his right.

Safe comes the ship to harbour,

Through billows and through gales,

If once the Great Twin Brethren

Sit shining on the sails.”[15]

This picturesque dialogue between Priam and his fascinating guest is

interrupted far too soon for the reader’s complete enjoyment--somewhat

too abruptly, indeed, for its perfection. One would like to have heard

Helen’s estimate of the other leaders of the Greeks; of Diomed, of the

lesser Ajax, of Nestor, of Mnestheus the Athenian; and it is hardly

possible not to fancy that the scene has been left by the poet

incomplete, or that some portion has been lost past recovery. The

tragedian Æschylus, who was full of the true Homeric spirit, carried out

the idea to what seems its natural completion in a remarkable scene of

‘The Seven Chiefs against Thebes,’ to which we may hope to introduce

our readers more fully hereafter. Euripides, in his ‘Phœnissæ,’ adopts

the very same machinery; and Tasso has also imitated the scene in his

‘Jerusalem Delivered,’[16] where he brings Erminia on the walls,

pointing out to King Aladine the persons of the most renowned of the

besieging knights.

The interruption is as little satisfactory to Priam as to the reader. A

herald summons the king of Troy to a conference in the mid-space between

the city walls and the enemy’s leaguer, in order to ratify the

armistice, while Paris and Menelaus decide their quarrel in single

combat. The old man mounts his chariot, “shuddering,” as foreboding the

defeat and death of his son. Agamemnon and Ulysses on the one side,

Priam and Antenor on the other, duly slay the sacrificial lambs, and

make joint appeal to Jupiter, the Avenger of oaths, pouring the red wine

upon the earth with solemn imprecation, that so may flow forth the

heart’s blood of him who on either part shall break the truce. And the

god listens as before, but does not accept the appeal. Priam withdraws,

for he cannot bear to be a spectator of his son’s peril. Hector and

Ulysses, precisely in the fashion of the marshals in the tournaments of

chivalry, measure out the lists; the rest of the Greeks lie down on the

ground beside their horses and chariots, while the lots are cast which

shall first throw the spear. The chance falls to Paris. He throws, and

strikes full and fair in the centre of Menelaus’ round shield. But the

seasoned bull’s hide turns the point, and it does not penetrate. Next

comes the turn of Menelaus. Paris has ventured no appeal to heaven; but

the Greek king lifts his voice in prayer to Jupiter for vengeance on

the traitor who has so abused his hospitality, before he poises his long

lance carefully and hurls it at his enemy. Right through shield,

breastplate, and linen vest goes the good Greek weapon; but Paris leans

back to avoid it, and it only grazes him. Menelaus rushes forward, sword

in hand, and smites a downright blow on Paris’ crest. But the Trojan

helmet proves of better quality than the shield, and the Greek blade

flies in shivers. Maddened by his double failure, he rushes on his

enemy, and seizing him by the horse-hair crest, drags him off by main

strength towards the ranks of the Greeks. But in this extremity the

goddess of love comes to the rescue of her favourite. At her touch the

tough bullhide strap of Paris’ head-piece, which was all but choking

him, breaks, and leaves the empty helmet in the hands of Menelaus. He

hurls it amongst his comrades in disappointment and disgust, and rushes

once more in pursuit of Paris. But Venus has wrapt him in a mist, and

carried him off; and while the son of Atreus rushes like a baffled lion

up and down the lists in quest of him, while even the Trojans are aiding

in the search, and no man among them would have hidden him--for “they

all hated him like black death”--he is safely laid by the goddess in

Helen’s chamber. The scene in which she receives him is, like all the

rest of her story, a beautiful contradiction. Her first greeting is

bitter enough. Either her heart has been indeed with Menelaus in the

fight--or at least she would have had her present husband come back from

the field, dead or alive, in some more honourable fashion--

“Back from the battle? Would thou there hadst died

Beneath a warrior’s arm whom once I called

My husband! Vainly didst thou boast erewhile

Thine arm, thy dauntless courage, and thy spear,

The warlike Menelaus should subdue!

Go now again, and challenge to the fight

The warlike Menelaus.--Be thou ware!

I warn thee, pause, ere madly thou presume

With fair-haired Menelaus to contend!” (D.)

Brave words! but still, as of old, the fatal spells of Venus are upon

her, and Paris’ misadventure in the lists is all too soon condoned.

CHAPTER III.

THE BROKEN TRUCE.

The Greeks claim the victory--reasonably, since the Trojan champion has

fled the lists; but again the intrigues of the court of Olympus

interfere to interrupt the course of mortal justice. The gods of Homer

are not the gods of Epicurus’ creed, who, as our English poet sings,

“lie beside their nectar, careless of mankind.” They are anything but

careless, so far as the affairs of mortals are concerned; but their

interference is regulated by the most selfish motives. Men are the

puppets whom they make to dance for their gratification--the counters

with which they play their Olympian game, and try to defeat and

checkmate each other. Even the respect which they pay to the mortal who

is regular in the matter of offering sacrifices is entirely selfish--it

seems to be merely the sensual appetite for fat roasts and rich savours.

They are commonly influenced by jealousy, pique, revenge, or

favouritism; and where they do punish the wrongdoer, it is far more

often from a sense of _lèse-majesté_--a slight offered to some cause

which is under their special protection--than from any moral indignation

at wrong itself. When the scene opens in the fourth book of the poem,

it seems to pass at once from serious melodrama to broad comedy; and but

that these dwellers in Olympus really rule the fortunes of the tale, it

would be scarcely possible not to believe that the poet so intended it.

We are introduced again, then, to Olympus; and, as before, to a quarrel

among the Immortals. It is Jove this time who is the aggressor. He has

seen the result of the combat, and taunts Juno with the double patronage

extended to the Greeks by herself and Minerva--which, after all, has

failed--while Venus, more active and energetic, has rescued her

favourite. However, he awards the victory to Menelaus; and suggests, as

a solution to all disputes and difficulties, that now Helen should be

given up, the Greeks go home, and so the fate of Troy be averted. At the

thought of her enemy thus escaping, the queen of the gods cannot contain

her rage. Jupiter gives way. He loves Troy much, but domestic peace and

quietness more. He warns his queen, however, that if he now consents to

give up Troy to her insatiable revenge, she shall not stand in his way

hereafter, in case some community of mortals who may be her especial

favourites shall incur his royal displeasure. And Juno, with that utter

indifference to human suffering, or human justice, which characterises

the deities of Olympus, makes answer in these words:--

“Three cities there are dearest to my heart;

Argos, and Sparta, and the ample streets

Of rich Mycenæ; work on them thy will--

Destroy them, if thine anger they incur--

I will not interpose nor hinder thee.”

In furtherance of this strange compact, Minerva is once more sent down

to the plains of Troy. Her mission now is to incite the Trojans to break

the truce by some overt act, and thus not only renew the war, but put

themselves plainly in the wrong. Clothing herself in the human shape of

the son of old Antenor, she mingles in the Trojan ranks, and addresses

herself to the cunning bowman Pandarus. His character in the Iliad has

nothing in common with the “Sir Pandarus of Troy,” whose name, as the

base uncle of Cressida, has passed into an unwholesome by-word, and whom

Lydgate, Chaucer, and, lastly, Shakespeare, borrowed from the medieval

romancers. Here he is but an archer of known skill, somewhat given to

display, with his bow of polished ibex-horns tipped with gold, and vain

of his reputation, whom the goddess easily tempts to end the long war at

once by a timely shot, and win immortal renown by taking off Menelaus.

With a brief prayer and a vow of a hecatomb to Apollo, the god of the

bow--who is supposed to be as ready as the rest of the immortals to abet

an act of treachery on such conditions--Pandarus ensconces himself

behind the shields of his comrades, and choosing out his arrow with the

same care which we read of in the great exploits of more modern bowmen,

he discharges it point-blank at the unsuspecting Menelaus. The shaft

flies true enough, but Minerva is at hand to avert the actual peril from

the Greek hero: she turns the arrow aside--

“As when a mother from her infant’s cheek,

Wrapt in sweet slumbers, brushes off a fly.”

It is a pretty simile; but the result is not so entirely harmless. The

arrow strikes in the belt, and so meets the double resistance of belt

and corslet. It draws blood, nevertheless, in a stream; and both

Menelaus and Agamemnon at first fear that the wound is mortal;--

“Great Agamemnon shuddered as he saw

The crimson blood-drops issuing from the wound,

Shuddered the warlike Menelaus’ self;

But when the sinew and the arrow-head

He saw projecting, back his spirit came.

Then, deeply groaning, Agamemnon spoke,

As Menelaus by the hand he held,

And with him groaned his comrades; ‘Brother dear,

Fatal to thee hath been the oath I swore,

When thou stoodst forth alone for Greece to fight;

Wounded by Trojans, who their plighted troth

Have trodden under foot.’” (D.)

Two points are remarkable in this passage: first, the tenderness which

Agamemnon shows towards his younger brother, even to the point of

self-reproach at having allowed him to fight Paris at all, though in a

quarrel which was so thoroughly his own. His expressions of grief and

remorse at the thought of going home to Greece without him (which run to

considerable length), though somewhat tinged with selfishness, inasmuch

as he feels his own honour at stake, are much more like the feeling of a

parent than of an elder brother. Again, the picture of Menelaus

“shuddering” at his own wound--so sensitive to the dread of death that

he apparently all but faints, until he is reassured by finding that the

barb of the arrow has not really penetrated--is utterly inconsistent

with our English notions of a hero. We have to bear in mind, here and

elsewhere, that these Greek heroes, of whatever race we are to suppose

them to be, are of an entirely different temperament to us cold and

self-restrained northerns. They are highly sensitive to bodily pain,

very much given to groans and tears, and very much afraid of death for

themselves, however indifferent to human life in the case of others.

Death, to these sensuous Greeks, was an object of dread and aversion,

chiefly because it implied to their minds something like annihilation.

However vivid in some passages of their poets is the description of

those happy Elysian fields where the souls of heroes dwelt, the popular

belief gave to the disembodied spirit but a shadowy and colourless

existence.

The wound is soon stanched by the aid of the skilful leech Machaon, son

of Æsculapius (and therefore grandson of Apollo “the Healer”), but who

is a warrior and chieftain as well as the rest, though he has placed his

skill at the service of Agamemnon. The King of Men himself, as soon as

his brother’s hurt is tended, rushes along the lines, rousing chiefs and

clansmen to avenge the treachery of the enemy. Idomeneus of Crete, Ajax

the Greater and the Less, Mnestheus of Athens, Ulysses, Diomed--to all

in turn he makes his passionate appeal; to some, in language which they

are inclined to resent, as implying that they were disinclined for the

combat. Diomed and Sthenelus he even reminds of the brave deeds of their

fathers Tydeus and Capaneus in the great siege of Thebes, and stings

them with the taunt, that the sons will never win the like renown.

Diomed hears in silence; but the son of Capaneus inherits, with all the

bravery, something of the insolence of the chief who swore that “with or

without the gods” he would burn Thebes: he answers the great king in

words which have yet a certain nobility in their self-assertion--

“Atrides, lie not, when thou know’st the truth;

We hold ourselves far better than our sires;

We took the strength of seven-gated Thebes,

Though with a smaller host we stormed her towers,

Strong in heaven’s omens and the help of Jove;

For them--their own presumption was their fall.”

All the leaders of the Greeks eagerly marshal their forces at the King’s

call. Nestor’s experienced counsel orders the line of battle--so well,

that subsequent commanders were fain to take a lesson from it.

“In the front rank, with chariot and with horse,

He placed the mounted warriors; in the rear,

Num’rous and brave, a cloud of infantry,

Compactly massed, to stem the tide of war.

Between the two he placed th’ inferior troops,

That e’en against their will they needs must fight.

The horsemen first he charged, and bade them keep

Their horses well in hand, nor wildly rush

Amid the tumult: ‘See,’ he said, ‘that none,

In skill or valour over-confident,

Advance before his comrades, nor alone

Retire; for so your lines were easier forced;

But ranging each beside a hostile car,

Thrust with your spears; for such the better way;

By men so disciplined, in elder days,

Were lofty walls and fencèd towers destroyed.’” (D.)

CHAPTER IV.

THE FIRST DAY’S BATTLE.

As before, while the Greek line advances in perfect silence, the Trojans

make their onset with loud shouts and a clamour of discordant war-cries

in many tongues. Mars animates the Trojans, Minerva the Greeks; while

Fear and Panic hover over the two armies, and Strife--whom the poet

describes in words which are the very echo of Solomon’s proverb--“The

beginning of strife is as when one letteth out water”--

“With humble crest at first, anon her head,

While yet she treads the earth, affronts the skies.”

The two armies close in battle, only embittered by the broken truce. The

description is a good specimen of the poet’s powers, and Lord Derby’s

translation is sufficiently close:--

“Then rose the mingled shouts and groans of men

Slaying and slain; the earth ran red with blood.

As when descending from the mountain’s brow

Two wintry torrents from their copious source

Pour downwards to the narrow pass, where meet

Their mingled waters in some deep ravine,

Their weight of flood, on the far mountain’s side

The shepherd hears the roar; so loud arose

The shouts and yells of those commingling hosts.”[17]

Then begins one of those remarkable descriptions of a series of single

combats between warriors of note on either side, in which Homer delights

and excels. It must be confessed that they are somewhat wearisome to a

modern reader; although, as has been well observed, the details of

attack and defence, wounds and death, are varied in a fashion which

shows that the artist was thoroughly master of his work; and it is even

said that in the physical results assigned to each particular wound he

has shown no mean knowledge of anatomy. Still, the continuous catalogue

of ghastly wounds and dying agonies is uncongenial with our more refined

sympathies. But it was quite in harmony with the tastes of ruder days.

We find the same apparent repetition of single combats in the medieval

romances--notably in Mallory’s King Arthur; and they were probably not

the least popular portions of the tale. Even a stronger parallel case

might be found in the description of a prize-fight in the columns of

sporting newspapers, not so many years ago, when each particular blow

and its results, up to “Round 102,” were graphically described in

language quite as figurative, if not so poetic, as Homer’s; and found,

we must suppose, a sufficient circle of readers to whom it was not only

intelligible but highly interesting. The poet who recites--as we must

suppose Homer to have done--must above everything else excite and

interest his audience: his lay must be rich in incident; and to an

audience who were all more or less warlike, no incidents could be so

exciting as the details of battle. There is much savageness in Homer’s

combats; but savageness is to the taste of men whose only means of

excitement is through their grosser senses, and a love of the horrible

in fact or fiction is by no means extinct even in our own day.

Young Antilochus, the son of Nestor’s old age, draws the first blood in

the battle. He kills Echepolus.

“Beneath his horsehair-plumèd helmet’s peak

The sharp spear struck; deep in his forehead fixed,

It pierced the bone: then darkness veiled his eyes,

And, like a tower, amid the press he fell.”

Over his dead body the combat grows furious--the Greeks endeavouring to

drag him off to strip his armour, the Trojans to prevent it. The armour

of a vanquished enemy was, in these combats, something like what an

enemy’s scalp is to the Indian “brave;” to carry it off in triumph, and

hang it up in their own tents as a trophy, was the great ambition of the

slayer and his friends. Ajax, too, slays his man--spearing him right

through from breast to shoulder: and the tall Trojan falls like a

poplar--

“Which with his biting axe the wheelwright fells.”

Ulysses, roused by the death of a friend who is killed in trying to

carry off this last body, rushes to the front, and poising his spear,

looks round to choose his victim. The foremost of his enemies recoil;

but he drives his weapon right through the temples of Demophoon, a

natural son of Priam, as he sits high in his chariot. The Trojans waver;

even Hector gives ground; the Greeks cheer, and some carry off the

bodies, while the rest press forward. It is going hard with Troy, when

Apollo, who sits watching the battle from the citadel, calls loudly to

their troops to remember that “there is no Achilles in the field

to-day.” So the fight is renewed, Minerva cheering on the Greeks, as

Apollo does the Trojans.

Diomed, the gallant son of Tydeus, now becomes the hero of the day. His

exploits occupy, indeed, so large a portion of the next book of the

poem, that it was known as “The Deeds of Diomed,” and would form,

according to one theory, a separate romance or lay of itself, exactly as

some portions of the Arthurian romance have for their exclusive hero

some one renowned Knight of the Round Table, as Tristram or Lancelot.

Diomed fights under supernatural colours. Minerva herself not only

inspires him with indomitable courage, but sheds over his whole person a

halo of celestial radiance before which the bravest Trojan might well

recoil--

“Forth from his helm and shield a fiery light

There flashed, like autumn’s star, that brightest shines

When newly risen from his ocean bath.”

Once more the prince of archers, Pandarus the Lycian, comes to the

rescue of the discomfited Trojans. He bends his bow against Diomed, who

is now fighting on foot, and the arrow flies true to its mark. He sees

it strike deep into the shoulder, and the red blood streams out visibly

over the breastplate. Elated by his success, he turns round and shouts

his triumphant rallying-cry to the Trojans--“The bravest of the Greeks

is wounded to the death!” But his exultation is premature. Diomed gets

him back to his chariot, and calls on his faithful friend and charioteer

Sthenelus to draw the arrow from the wound. The blood wells out fast,

as the barb is withdrawn; but the hero puts up a brief prayer to his

guardian goddess for strength yet to avenge him of his adversary, whose

exulting boast he has just heard. Minerva hears. By some rapid celestial

pharmacy she heals the wound at once, and gives him fresh strength and

vigour, adding these words of encouragement and warning:--

“Go fearless onward, Diomed, to meet

The Trojan hosts; for I within thy breast

Thy father’s dauntless courage have infused,

Such as of old in Tydeus’ bosom dwelt,

Bold horseman, buckler-clad; and from thine eyes

The film that dimmed them I have purged away,[18]

That thou mayest well ’twixt gods and men discern.

If then some god make trial of thy force,

With other of the Immortals fight thou not;

But should Jove’s daughter Venus dare the fray,

Thou need’st not shun at her to cast thy spear.” (D.)

With redoubled vigour and fury the hero returns to the battle; and again

the Trojans’ names, to each of which the poet contrives to give some

touch of individual character, swell the list of his victims. Æneas

marks his terrible career, and goes to seek for Pandarus. He points out

to him the movements of the Greek champion, and bids him try upon his

person the far-famed skill that had so nearly turned the fate of war in

the case of Menelaus. Pandarus tells him of his late unsuccessful

attempt, and declares his full belief that some glamour of more than

mortal power has made Diomed invulnerable to human weapons. He bitterly

regrets, as he tells Æneas, that he did not follow the counsels of his

father Lycaon, and bring with him to the campaign, like other chiefs of

his rank, some of those noble steeds of whom eleven pair stand always in

his father’s stalls, “champing the white barley and the spelt.” He had

feared, in truth, that they might lack provender in the straits of the

siege:--

“Woe worth the day, when from the glittering wall,

Hector to serve, I took my shafts and bow,

And to fair Ilion, from my father’s hall,

Captain of men, did with my Lycians go!

If ever I return, if ever I know

My country, my dear wife, my home again,

Let me fall headless to an enemy’s blow,

Save the red blaze of fire these arms contain!” (W.)

Æneas bids him mount with him into his chariot, and together they will

encounter this redoubtable Greek. Pandarus takes the spear and shield,

while Æneas guides the horses. Diomed is still fighting on foot, when

Sthenelus, who attends him with the chariot, sees the two hostile chiefs

bearing down upon him. He begs his comrade to remount, and avoid the

encounter with two such adversaries. Diomed indignantly refuses. He will

slay both, with the help of Heaven; and he charges Sthenelus, if such

should be the happy result, to leave his own horses and chariot,

securing the reins carefully to the chariot-front, and make prize of the

far-famed steeds of Æneas--they are descended from the immortal breed

bestowed of old by Jupiter upon King Tros. So, on foot still, he awaits

their onset. Pandarus stands high in the chariot with poised weapon,

and hails his enemy as he comes within hurling distance:--

“Prince, thou art met! though late in vain assailed,

The spear may enter where the arrow failed.”

It does enter, and piercing through the tough ox-hide of the shield,

stands fixed in the breastplate. Again, with premature triumph, he

shouts exultingly to Diomed that at last he has got his death-wound. But

the Greek quietly tells him that he has missed--which assuredly he

himself is not going to do. He hurls his spear in turn with fatal aim:

and the poet tells us with ghastly detail how it entered beneath the

eyeball, and passed down through the “white teeth” and tongue--

“Till the bright point looked out beneath the chin”--

and Pandarus the Lycian closes his career, free at least from the

baseness which medieval romances have attached to his name.

Æneas, in obedience to the laws of heroic chivalry, at once leaps down

from the chariot to defend against all comers the body of his fallen

comrade.

“And like a lion fearless in his strength

Around the corpse he stalked this way and that,

His spear and buckler round about him held,

To all who dared approach him threat’ning death.”

Diomed in this case avails himself of a mode of attack not uncommon with

Homer’s heroes. He seizes a huge stone--which not two men of this

degenerate age (says Homer, with a poet’s cynicism for the present)

could have lifted--and hurls it at the Trojan prince. It strikes him on

the hip, crushes the joint, and brings him to his knees. But that his

goddess-mother Venus comes to his rescue, the world had heard the last

of Æneas, and Virgil must have sought another hero for his great poem.

“About her much-loved son her arms she throws--

Her arms, whose whiteness match the falling snows;

Screened from the foe behind her shining veil,

The swords wave harmless and the javelins fail.” (P.)

Sthenelus, for his part, remembers the orders of his friend and chief,

and drives off at once to the Greek camp with the much-coveted horses of

Æneas. Diomed rushes in pursuit of Venus--whom he knows, by his new gift

of clear vision--as she carries off her son through the ranks of the

Trojans. She, at least, of all the divinities of Olympus, had no

business, thought the Greek, in the _mêlée_ of battle. Besides, he had

received from Minerva special permission to attack her. Most

ungallantly, to our notions, he does so. The scene is such a curious

one, that it is well to give Lord Derby’s version of it:--

“Her, searching through the crowd, at length he found,

And springing forward, with his pointed spear

A wound inflicted on her tender hand.

Piercing th’ ambrosial veil, the Graces’ work,

The sharp spear grazed her palm below the wrist.

Forth from the wound th’ immortal current flowed,

Pure ichor, life-stream of the blessed Gods;

They eat no bread, they drink no ruddy wine,

And bloodless thence and deathless they become.

The goddess shrieked aloud, and dropped her son;

But in his arms Apollo bore him off

In a thick cloud enveloped, lest some Greek

Might pierce his breast, and rob him of his life.

Loud shouted brave Tydides, as she fled:

‘Daughter of Jove, from battle-fields retire;

Enough for thee weak women to delude;

If war thou seek’st, the lesson thou shalt learn

Shall cause thee shudder but to hear it named.’

Thus he; but ill at ease, and sorely pained,

The Goddess fled: her, Iris, swift as wind,

Caught up, and from the tumult bore away,

Weeping with pain, her fair skin soiled with blood.”

It is the original of the grand passage in the ‘Paradise Lost,’ in which

the English poet has adopted almost literally the Homeric idea of

suffering inflicted on an immortal essence, while carefully avoiding the

ludicrous element in the scene. In the battle of the Angels, Michael

cleaves Satan down the right side:--

“The griding sword with discontinuous wound

Passed through him; but th’ ethereal substance closed,

Not long divisible; and from the gash

A stream of nectar’ous humour issuing flowed,

Sanguine, such as celestial spirits may bleed.”

--Par. Lost, vi. 329.

In sore plight the goddess mounts to Olympus, and there, throwing

herself into the arms of her mother Dione, bewails the wrong she has

suffered at the hands of a presumptuous mortal. Dione comforts her as

best she may, reminding her how in times past other of the Olympian

deities have had to endure woes from men: Mars, when the giants Otus and

Ephialtes bound him for thirteen months in brazen fetters; Juno herself,

the queen of Heaven, and Pluto, the king of the Shades, had been wounded

by the daring Hercules. She foretells, however, an untimely death for

the presumptuous hero who has raised his hand against a goddess:--

“Fool and blind!

Unknowing he how short his term of life,

Who fights against the gods! for him no child

Upon his knees shall lisp a father’s name,

Safe from the war and battle-field returned.

Brave as he is, let Diomed beware

He meet not with a mightier than himself:

Then fair Ægiale, Adrastus’ child,

The noble wife of valiant Diomed,

Shall long, with lamentations loud, disturb

The slumbers of her house, and vainly mourn

Her youthful lord, the bravest of the Greeks.” (D.)

But Dione is no prophet. Diomed returned home (if the later legends are

to be believed) to find that his wife Ægiale had been anything but

inconsolable during his absence.

Venus’ wound is healed, and her tears are soon dried. But Minerva--whose

province in the celestial government seems to be not only wisdom but

satire--cannot resist a jest upon the unfortunate plight of the Queen of

Love. She points her out to Jupiter, and suggests as a probable

explanation of the wound, that she has been trying to lead astray some

other fair Greek, like Helen,--

“And as her hand the gentle dame caressed,

A golden clasp has scratched her slender arm.”

Jupiter smiles, and calling his pouting daughter-goddess to his side,

recommends her in future to leave to Mars and Minerva the dangers of the

battle-field, and confine her own prowess to campaigns in which she is

likely to be more victorious.

Diomed is still rushing in pursuit of Æneas. He knows that Apollo is

shielding him; but not even this knowledge checks the impetuous Greek.

“Thrice was his onset made, with murd’rous aim,

And thrice Apollo struck his glittering shield;

But when with godlike force he sought to make

His fourth attempt, the Far-destroyer spake

In terms of awful menace; ‘Be advised,

Tydides, and retire; nor as a god

Thyself esteem, since not alike the race

Of gods immortal and of earth-born men.’” (D.)

Diomed accepts the warning, and Æneas is carried off to the temple of

Apollo in the citadel, where Latona and Diana tend and heal him. Apollo

meanwhile replaces him in the battle by a phantom likeness, round which

Greeks and Trojans continue the fight. Then he calls his brother deity

the War-god to the rescue of the hard-prest Trojans, and entreats him to

scare from the field this irreverent and outrageous champion, who, he

verily believes, would lift his spear against Olympian Jove himself. In

the likeness of a Thracian chief, Mars calls Hector to the rescue; and

the Trojan prince leaps from his chariot, and, crying his battle-cry,

turns the tide of war. Æneas is restored, sound and well, to his place

in the _mêlée_--somewhat indeed to the astonishment of his friends, who

had seen him lying so long grievously wounded; but, as the poet pithily

remarks, little time had they to ask him questions. The two Ajaxes,

Ulysses, Menelaus, and Agamemnon himself, “king of men,” come to the

forefront of the Greek battle: and the young Antilochus, son of the

venerable Nestor, notably wins his spurs. But the Trojans have

supernatural aid: and Diomed, of the purged vision, cries to his friends

to beware, for that he sees the War-god in their front brandishing his

huge spear. The Greek line warily gives ground before this immortal

adversary. The Queen of Heaven can no longer endure to be a mere

spectatress of the peril of her favourites. She obtains permission from

Jupiter to send Minerva against Mars: and the two goddesses, seated in

Juno’s chariot of state, glide down from Olympus--

“Midway between the earth and starry heaven”--

and alight upon the plain of Troy. There Juno, taking human shape,

taunts the Greek troops with cowardice--

“In form of Stentor of the brazen voice,

Whose shout was as the shout of fifty men”--

and whose name has made a familiar place for itself in our English

vocabulary.

“Shame on ye, Greeks, base cowards! brave alone

In outward semblance: while Achilles yet

Went forth to battle, from the Dardan gates

The Trojans never ventured to advance.”

Minerva seeks out Diomed, whom she finds leaning on his chariot, resting

awhile from the fight, and bathing the wound made by the arrow of

Pandarus. She taunts him with his inferiority to his great father

Tydeus, who was, she reminds him, “small in stature, but every inch a

soldier.” Diomed excuses himself by reference to her own charge to

him--to fight with none of the immortals save Venus only. But now the

goddess withdraws the prohibition, and herself--putting on the “helmet

of darkness,” to hide herself from Mars--takes her place beside him in

the chariot, instead of Sthenelus, his henchman and charioteer: and the

chariot-axle groans beneath the more than mortal load. They drive in

full career against the War-god: in vain he hurls his spear against

Diomed, for the hand of the goddess turns it safely aside. The mortal

champion is more successful: his spear strikes Mars in the flank,

piercing the flesh, and drawing from him, as from Venus, the heavenly

“ichor.” And the wounded god cries out with a shout like that of ten

thousand men, so that both hosts listen to the sound with awe and

trembling. He too, like Venus, flies to Olympus, and there makes piteous

complaint of the impious deeds which, at the instigation of Minerva,

this headstrong mortal is permitted to do. His father Jupiter rates him

soundly, as the outlaw of the Olympian family, inheriting his mother

Juno’s headstrong temper. However, he bids Pæon, the physician of the

immortals, heal the wound, and Hebe prepares him a bath. Juno and

Minerva have done their work, having driven Mars from the field, and

they too quit the plains of Troy, and leave the mortal heroes to

themselves.

While Diomed still pursues his career of slaughter, Menelaus gives token

of that easy and pliant disposition which half explains his behaviour to

Helen. He has at his mercy a Trojan who has been thrown from his

chariot, and begs his life. The fair-haired king is about to spare

him,--as none in the whole story of the fight is spared,--when his

brother Agamemnon comes up, and after chiding him for such

soft-heartedness, pins the wretched suppliant to the ground with his

ashen spear.

So the fight goes on through the sixth book; which is, however, chiefly

remarkable for two of the most striking episodes in the poem. The first

is the meeting of Diomed with the young Lycian captain, Glaucus.

Encountering him in the field, and struck by his bold bearing, he asks

his name and race. Glaucus replies with that pathetic simile which,

found under many forms in many poets, has its earliest embodiment in the

verse of the Hebrew Psalmist and the Greek bard. “The days of man are

but as grass.”

“Brave son of Tydeus, wherefore set thy mind

My race to know? the generations are

As of the leaves, so also of mankind.

As the leaves fall, now withering in the wind,

And others are put forth, and spring descends,

Such on the earth the race of men we find;

Each in his order a set time attends;

One generation rises and another ends.” (W.)

The young chieftain goes on, nevertheless, to announce his birth and

lineage. He is the grandson of the noble Bellerophon--the rider of the

wondrous horse Pegasus and the slayer of the monster Chimæra--all of

whose exploits he narrates at length, with some disregard to

probabilities, in the full roar of the battle round him. It turns out

that he and Diomed are bound together by a tie which all of Greek blood

scrupulously respected--the rights of hospitality exercised towards each

other by some of their ancestors. Such obligations descended from father

to son, and served from time to time to mitigate the fierce and

vindictive spirit of an age when every man’s hand was in some sort

against another. The grandfather of Diomed had been Bellerophon’s guest

and friend. So the Greek places his spear in the ground, and vows that

he will not raise his arm against Glaucus. There are enough besides of

the Trojan allies for him to slay, and Glaucus may find Greeks enough on

whom to flesh his valour; but for themselves, the old hereditary bond

shall hold good, and in token of amity they will change armour. A good

exchange, indeed, for Diomed; for whereas his own is but of the ordinary

brass or bronze, the young Lycian’s panoply is richly inlaid with

gold--“a hundred oxen’s worth for the worth of nine.” The Greek words

have passed into a proverb.

The Trojans are still hard prest, and by the advice of his brother

Helenus, who has the gift of soothsaying, and is as it were the domestic

priest of the royal household, Hector hastens to the city, and directs

his mother Hecuba to go with her matrons in solemn procession to the

temple of Pallas, and beseech the goddess to withdraw the terrible

Diomed from the field. In the palace, to his indignation, he finds

Paris dallying with Helen, and polishing his armour instead of joining

the fight. Hector upbraids him sharply: and Helen, in a speech full of

self-abasement, laments the unworthiness of her paramour. Hector speaks

no word of reproach to her, though he gently declines her invitation to

rest himself also a while from the battle. Paris promises to follow him

at once to the field; and Hector moves on to his own wife’s apartments,

to see her and his child once more before he goes back to the combat

which he has a half-foreboding will end fatally for himself, whatever be

the fortunes of Troy.

And now we are introduced to the second female character in the poem,

standing in the strongest possible contrast with that of Helen, but of

no less admirable conception. It is remarkable how entirely Homer

succeeds in interesting us in his women, without having recourse to what

might seem to us the very natural expedient of dwelling on their

personal charms; especially when it is taken into account that, in his

simple narrative, he has not the resources of the modern novelist, who

can make even the plainest heroine attractive by painting her mental

perfections, or setting before us the charms of her conversation. It has

been said that he rather assumes than describes the beauty of Helen: in

the case of Andromache, it has been remarked that he never once applies

to her any epithet implying personal attractions, though all his

translators, Lord Derby included, have been tempted to do so. It is as

the wife and mother that Andromache charms us. We readily assume that

she is comely, graceful--all that a woman should be; but it is simple

grace of domestic character which forms the attraction of the Trojan

princess.

Hector does not find her, as he expects, in the palace. She had heard

how the fortunes of the day seemed turning against the Trojans; and she

had hurried, “like one distraught,” to the tower of the citadel, to see

with her own eyes how the fight was going. He meets her at the Scæan

gates, with the nurse and the child, “whom Hector called Scamandrius,

from the river, but the citizens Astyanax”--“defender of the city.” The

father looks silently on his boy, and smiles; Andromache in tears clings

to her husband, and makes a pathetic appeal to him not to be too

prodigal of a life which is so dear to his wife and child. Her fate has

been already that of many women of her day. Her father and seven tall

brethren have been slain by the fierce Achilles, when ravaging the

country round Troy he destroyed their native city of Cilician Thebes:

her mother too is dead, and she is left alone. She adds the touching

loving confession, which Pope’s version has made popular enough even to

unclassical ears--

“But while my Hector still survives, I see

My father, mother, brethren, all in thee.”

Hector soothes her, but it is with a mournful foreboding of evil to

come. He values too much his own honour and fair fame to shrink from the

battle:--

“I should blush

To face the men and long-robed dames of Troy,

If like a coward I could shun the fight;

Nor could my soul the lessons of my youth

So far forget, whose boast it still has been

In the fore-front of battle to be found,

Charged with my father’s glory and mine own.

Yet in my inmost soul too well I know

The day must come when this our sacred Troy,

And Priam’s race, and Priam’s royal self,

Shall in one common ruin be o’erthrown.” (D.)

But that which wrings his heart most of all is the vision before his

eyes of his beloved wife dragged into slavery. Pope’s version of the

rest of the passage is so good of its kind, and has so naturalised the

scene to our English conceptions, that no closer version will ever

supersede it.

“Thus having spoke, th’ illustrious chief of Troy

Stretched his fond arms to clasp the lovely boy;

The babe clung crying to his nurse’s breast,

Scared at the dazzling helm and nodding crest.

With secret pleasure each fond parent smiled,

And Hector hasted to relieve his child,

The glitt’ring terrors from his brows unbound,

And placed the beaming helmet on the ground.

Then kissed the child, and lifting high in air,

Thus to the Gods preferred a father’s prayer:

‘O thou! whose glory fills th’ ethereal throne,

And all ye deathless powers! protect my son!

Grant him, like me, to purchase just renown,

To guard the Trojans, to defend the crown,

Against his country’s foes the war to wage,

And rise the Hector of the future age!

So when triumphant from successful toils,

Of heroes slain he bears the reeking spoils,

Whole hosts may hail him with deserved acclaim,

And say--This chief transcends his father’s fame:

While pleased amidst the general shouts of Troy,

His mother’s conscious heart o’erflows with joy.’

He spoke, and fondly gazing on her charms,

Restored the pleasing burthen to her arms;

Soft on her fragrant breast the babe she laid,

Hushed to repose, and with a smile surveyed.

The troubled pleasure soon chastised by fear,

She mingled with the smile a tender tear.

The softened chief with kind compassion viewed,

And dried the falling drops, and thus pursued.”

The “charms,” be it said, are entirely Pope’s idea, and do not harmonise

with the simplicity of the true Homeric picture. The husband was not

thinking of his wife’s beauty. He “caresses her with his hand,” and

tries to cheer her with the thought that no hero dies until his work is

done.

“For, till my day of destiny is come,

No man may take my life; and when it comes,

Nor brave nor coward can escape that day.

But go thou home, and ply thy household cares,

The loom and distaff, and appoint thy maids

Their several tasks; and leave to men of Troy,

And chief of all to me, the toils of war.” (D.)

The tender yet half-contemptuous tone in which the iron soldier

relegates the woman to her own inferior cares, is true to the spirit of

every age in which war is the main business of man’s life. Something in

the same tone is the charming scene between Hotspur and his lady in

Shakspeare’s ‘Henry IV.’

“_Hotspur._ Away, you trifler!--Love? I love thee not,--

I care not for thee, Kate; this is no world

To play with mammets and to tilt with lips:

We must have bloody noses and crack’t crowns,

And pass them current too.--God’s me, my horse!--

What say’st thou, Kate? What wouldst thou have with me?

_Lady Percy._ Do you not love me? Do you not indeed?

Well,--do not, then; for since you love me not,

I will not love myself.--Do you not love me?

Nay, tell me if you speak in jest, or no.

_Hotspur._ Come, wilt thou see me ride?

And when I am o’ horseback, I will swear

I love thee infinitely. But hark you, Kate:

I must not have you henceforth question me

Whither I go, nor reason whereabout;

Whither I must, I must; and, to conclude,

This evening must I leave you, gentle Kate.

I know you wise; but yet, no further wise

Than Harry Percy’s wife: constant you are--

But yet a woman: and for secrecy,

No lady closer: for I well believe

Thou wilt not utter that thou dost not know.”

Hector and his wife part; he to the fight, accompanied now by Paris,

girt for the battle in glittering armour, the show knight of the

Trojans: Andromache back to the palace, casting many a lingering glance

behind at the gallant husband she is fated never again to see alive. The

Roman ladies of the last days of the Republic were not much given to

sentiment; but we do not wonder that Brutus’s wife, Portia, knowing well

the Homeric story, was moved to tears in looking at a picture of this

parting scene.

CHAPTER V.

THE SECOND DAY’S BATTLE.

By the advice of his brother Helenus, who knows the counsels of heaven,

Hector now challenges the Greek host to match some one of their

chieftains against him in single combat. There is an unwillingness even

amongst the bravest to accept the defiance--so terrible is the name of

Hector. Menelaus--always gallant and generous--is indignant at their

cowardice, and offers himself as the champion. He feels he is no match

for Hector; but, as he says with modest confidence, the issues in such

case lie in the hands of heaven. But Agamemnon, ever affectionately

careful of his brother, will not suffer such unequal risk: some more

stalwart warrior shall be found to maintain the honour of the Achæans.

Old Nestor rises, and loudly regrets that he has no longer the eye and

sinews of his youth--but the men of Greece, he sees with shame, are not

now what they were in his day. Stung by the taunt, nine chiefs spring to

their feet at once, and offer themselves for the combat. Conspicuous

amongst them are Diomed, the giant Ajax, and King Agamemnon himself; and

when the choice of a champion is referred to lot, the hopes and wishes

of the whole army are audibly expressed, that on one of these three the

lot may fall. It falls on Ajax; and amidst the congratulations and

prayers of his comrades, the tall chieftain dons his armour, and strides

forth to meet his adversary. The combat is maintained with vigour on

both sides, till dusk comes on; the heralds interpose, and they separate

with mutual courtesies and exchange of presents.

Both armies agree to a truce, that they may collect and burn their dead

who strew the plain thickly after the long day’s battle. The Trojans,

dispirited by their loss, and conscious that, owing to the breach of the

first truce by the treacherous act of Pandarus, they are fighting under

the curse of perjury, hold a council of war, in which Antenor (the

Nestor of Troy) proposes to restore Helen and her wealth, and so put an

end at last to this weary siege. But Paris refuses--he will give back

the treasure, but not Helen; and the proposal thus made is spurned by

the Greeks as an insult. They busy themselves in building a

fortification--ditch, and wall, and palisade--to protect their fleet

from any sudden incursion of the Trojans. When this great work is

completed, they devote the next night to one of those heavy feasts and

deep carousals, to which men of the heroic mould have always had the

repute of being addicted in the intervals of hard fighting. Most

opportunely, a fleet of merchant-ships comes in from Lemnos, laden with

wine; in part a present sent by Euneus, son of the renowned voyager

Jason, to the two royal brothers; in part a trading speculation, which

meets with immediate success among the thirsty host. The thunder of

Olympus rolls all through the night, for the Thunderer is angry at the

prolongation of the war: but the Greeks content their consciences with

pouring copious libations to appease his wrath, and after their

prolonged revelry sink into careless slumber.

At daybreak Jupiter holds a council in Olympus, and harangues the

assembled deities at some length--with a special request that he may not

be interrupted. He forbids, on pain of his royal displeasure, any

further interference on the part of the Olympians on either side in the

contest; and then, mounting his chariot, descends in person to Mount Ida

to survey the field of battle, once more crowded with fierce combatants.

He hesitates, apparently, which side he shall aid--for he has no

intention of observing for himself the neutrality which he has so

strictly enjoined upon others. So he weighs in a balance the fates of

Greek and Trojan: the former draws down the scale, while the destiny of

Troy mounts to heaven. The metaphor is reversed, according to our modern

notions; it is the losing side which should be found wanting when

weighed in the balance. And so Milton has it in the passage which is

undoubtedly founded on these lines of Homer. “The Omnipotent,” says

Milton,

“Hung forth in heaven His golden scales, yet seen

Betwixt Astræa and the Scorpion sign,

Wherein all things created first He weighed,

The pendulous round earth with balanced air

In counterpoise; now ponders all events,

Battles and realms; in these He put two weights,

The sequel each of parting and of fight:

The latter quick up flew and kicked the beam.”

And Gabriel bids Satan look up, and mark the warning:--

“‘For proof look up,

And read thy lot in yon celestial sign,

Where thou art weighed, and shown how light, how weak,

If thou resist!’ The Fiend looked up, and knew

His mounted scale aloft; nor more, but fled

Murmuring, and with him fled the shades of night.”

--Par. Lost, end of B. iv.

In accordance with this decision the Thunderer sends his lightnings down

upon the host of the Greeks, and throws them into terror and confusion.

Nestor, still in the thickest of the fray, has one of his chariot-horses

killed by a shaft from the bow of Paris; and while he is thus all but

helpless, Diomed sees the terrible Hector bearing down on the old chief

in full career. He bids Nestor mount with him, and together they

encounter the Trojan prince, against whom Diomed hurls his spear: he

misses Hector, but kills his charioteer. As Diomed presses on, a

thunderbolt from Jupiter ploughs the ground right in front of his

startled horses. Nestor sees in this omen the wrath of heaven; and at

his entreaty Diomed reluctantly allows him to turn the horses, and

retires, pursued by the loud taunts of Hector, who bids the Greek

“wench” go hide herself. Thrice he half turns to meet his jesting enemy,

and thrice the roll of the angry thunder warns him not to dare the wrath

of the god. Hector in triumph shouts to his comrades to drive the Greeks

back to their new trenches, and burn their fleet. He calls to his horses

by name (he drove a bright bay and a chestnut, and called them Whitefoot

and Firefly), and bids them do him good suit and service now, if ever,

in return for all the care they have had from Andromache, who has fed

them day by day with her own hands, even before she would offer the

wine-cup to their thirsty master. The Greeks are driven back into their

trenches, where they are rallied by the royal brothers Agamemnon and

Menelaus in person. They have too on their side a bowman as good as

Pandarus or Paris, who now does them gallant service. It is Teucer, the

younger brother of the huge Ajax. The description of his manner of fight

would suit almost exactly the light archer and his pavoise-bearer of the

medieval battle:--

“Ajax the shield extended: Teucer then

Peered from behind, and with a shaft forth stept,

And slew one singled from the enemy’s men:

Then, as a child creeps to his mother, crept

To Ajax, who the shield before him swept.” (W.)

Eight times he draws his bow, and every arrow reaches its mark in a

Trojan. Twice he shoots at Hector, but each time the shaft is turned

aside, and finds some less renowned victim. Of these the last is

Hector’s charioteer--the second who in this day’s battle has paid the

forfeit of that perilous honour. Hector leaps down to avenge his death,

and Teucer, felled to the ground by a huge fragment of rock, is carried

off the field with a broken shoulder, still covered by the shield of

Ajax. The Greeks remain penned within their stockade, and nothing but

the approach of night saves their fleet from destruction. The victorious

Trojans bivouac on the field, their watch-fires lighting up the night;

for Hector’s only fear now is lest his enemies should embark and set

sail under cover of the darkness, and so escape the fate which he is

confident awaits them on the morrow. Mr Tennyson has chosen for

translation the fine passage describing the scene, which closes the

Eighth Book:--

“As when in heaven the stars about the moon

Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,

And every height comes out, and jutting peak,

And valley, and the immeasurable heavens

Break open to their highest, and all the stars

Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:

So many a fire between the ships and stream

Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,

A thousand on the plain; and close by each

Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;

And, champing golden grain, the horses stood

Hard by their chariots, waiting for the dawn.”

CHAPTER VI.

THE EMBASSY TO ACHILLES.

The opening of the Ninth Book shows us the Greeks utterly disheartened

inside their intrenchments. The threat of the dishonoured Achilles is

fast being accomplished: they cannot stand before Hector. Agamemnon

calls a hasty council, and proposes--in sad earnest, this time--that all

should re-embark and sail home to Greece. The proposal is received in

silence by all except Diomed. He boldly taunts the king with cowardice:

the other Greeks may go home if they will, but he and his good comrade

Sthenelus will stay and fight it out, even if they fight alone. Then

Nestor takes the privilege of his age to remind Agamemnon that his

insult to Achilles is the real cause of their present distress. Let an

embassy be sent to him where he lies beside his ships, in moody

idleness, to offer him apology and compensation for the wrong. The king

consents; and Ajax, Ulysses, and Phœnix are chosen to accompany the

royal heralds on this mission of reconciliation. Ajax--the chief who in

all warlike points stands second only to Achilles himself in the

estimation of the army--is a delegate to whom even the great captain of

the Myrmidons must surely listen with respect. Phœnix has been a sort of

foster-father to Achilles from his boyhood, intrusted with the care of

him by his father Peleus, and has now accompanied him to the war by the

old man’s special request, to aid him with advice and counsel. If any

one in the camp has any influence over the headstrong prince, it will be

the man who, as he says, has dandled him in his arms in his helpless

infancy. And no diplomatic enterprise could be complete without the

addition of Ulysses, the man of many devices and of persuasive tongue.

The chiefs set forth, and take their way along the shore to the camp of

the Myrmidons. They find Achilles sitting in his tent, solacing his

perturbed spirit with playing on the lyre, to the music of which he

sings the deeds of heroes done in the days of old--the exact prototype

of those knightly troubadours of later times, who combined the

accomplishments of the minstrel with the prowess of the soldier. His

faithful henchman Patroclus sits and listens to the song. With graceful

and lofty courtesy the chief of the Myrmidons rises from his seat, and

lays his lyre aside, and welcomes his visitors. He will hear no message

until they have shared his hospitality. He brings them in, and sets them

down on couches spread with purple tapestry. Then, with the grand

patriarchal simplicity of the days of Abraham, when no office done for a

guest was held to be servile, he bids Patroclus fill a larger bowl, and

mix the wine strong, and make good preparation of the flesh of sheep,

and goats, and well-fed swine. The great hero himself divides the

carcases, while his charioteer Automedon holds them. The joints are

cooked above the heaped embers on ample spits under the superintendence

of Patroclus; and when all is ready, they fall to with that wholesome

appetite which has been the characteristic of most heroes in classical

and medieval times, Achilles carving for his guests, while Patroclus

deals out the bread. Professor Wilson’s remarks on the scene are

characteristic:--

“In nothing was the constitution of the heroes more enviable than its

native power--of eating at all times, and without a moment’s warning.

Never does a meal to any distinguished individual come amiss. Their

stomachs were as heroic as their hearts, their bowels magnanimous. It

cannot have been forgotten by the reader, who hangs with a watering

mouth over the description of this entertainment, that about two hours

before these three heroes, Ulysses, Ajax, and old Phœnix, had made an

almost enormous supper in the pavilion of Agamemnon. But their walk

‘Along the margin of the sounding deep’

had reawakened their slumbering appetite.”

In this respect, too, the heroes of the Carlovingian and Arthurian

romances equal those of Homer--probably, indeed, taking their colour

from his originals. Nay, a good capacity for food and drink seems in

itself to have been considered an heroic quality. When Sir Gareth of

Orkney sits him down at table, coming as a stranger to King Arthur’s

court, his performance as a trencher-man excites as much admiration as

his soldier-like thews and sinews. The company declare of him

enthusiastically that “they never saw so goodly a man, nor so well of

his eating.” And in the same spirit Sir Kay, Arthur’s foster-brother, is

said, in the Welsh legend, to “have drunk like four, and fought like a

hundred.” The animal virtues are closely linked together; we still

prognosticate favourably of a horse’s powers of endurance if we see

that he is, like Sir Gareth, a good feeder. And perhaps it is some

lingering reminiscence of the old heroic ages that leads us still to

mark our appreciation of modern heroes by bestowing on them a public

dinner.

When the meal is over, Ulysses rises, and in accordance with immemorial

custom--as old, it appears, as these half-mythical ages--pledges the

health of their illustrious host. In a speech which does full justice to

the oratorical powers which the poet assigns him, he lays before

Achilles the proposal of Agamemnon. He sets forth the straits to which

the Greeks are reduced, pent within their fortifications by the terrible

Hector, and acknowledges, in the fullest manner, that in the great name

of Achilles lies their only hope of rescue. He dwells upon the remorse

which Achilles himself will surely feel, when too late, if he suffers

the hopes of Greece to be ruined by the indulgence of his own haughty

spirit--the temper against which, as he reminds him, his aged father

warned him when first he set out for Troy:--

“My son, the boon of strength, if so they will,

Juno or Pallas have the power to give;

But thou thyself thy haughty spirit must curb,

For better far is gentle courtesy.”

He lays before him the propositions of Agamemnon. Briseis shall be

restored to him, in all honour, pure as when she left him; so the great

point in the quarrel is fully conceded. Moreover, the king will give him

the choice of his three daughters in marriage, if it ever be their happy

fate to see again the shores of Argos, and will add such dowry

“As never man before to daughter gave.”

And he will send, for the present, peace-offerings of royal

magnificence; ten talents of pure gold, seven fair Lesbian slaves, “well

skilled in household cares,” twelve horses of surpassing fleetness--the

prizes they have already won would be in themselves a fortune--and seven

prosperous towns on the sea-coast of Argos. He adds, in well-conceived

climax to his speech, an appeal to higher motives. If Achilles will not

relax his wrath against Agamemnon, at least let him have some compassion

on the unoffending Greeks; let him bethink himself of the national

honour--of his own great name; shall Hector be allowed to boast, as he

does now, that no Greek dares meet him in the field?

But neither the eloquence of Ulysses, nor the garrulous pleading of his

old foster-father Phœnix, who indulges himself and his company with

stories of Achilles’ boyhood, and of the exploits of his own younger

days, can bend the iron determination of the hero. He will have none of

Agamemnon’s gifts, and none of Agamemnon’s daughters--no, not were the

princess as fair as Venus. Greece has store of fair maidens for him to

choose from if he will. Nay, had either woman or wealth been his

delight, he had scarce come to Troy. He had counted the cost when he set

out for the war:--

“Successful forays may good store provide;

And tripods may be gained, and noble steeds:

But when the breath of man hath passed his lips,

Nor strength, nor foray can the loss repair.

I by my goddess mother have been warned,

The silver-footed Thetis, that o’er me

A double chance of destiny impends:

If here remaining, round the walls of Troy

I wage the war, I ne’er shall see my home,

But then undying glory shall be mine:

If I return, and see my native land,

My glory all is gone; but length of life

Shall then be mine, and death be long deferred.” (D.)

Besides, he adds with biting sarcasm, Agamemnon can have no need now of

his poor services. He has built a wall, he hears,--with ditch and

palisade to boot: though he doubts whether, after all, it will keep out

Hector. To be sure, when _he_ was in the field, no wall was needed.

Nor is he a whit more moved by the few blunt and soldier-like remarks

with which Ajax closes the conference. They may as well return, says

that chief to Ulysses; words are lost upon one so obstinate as Achilles,

who will neither listen to reason, nor cares for the love of his old

companions in arms. Ajax has no patience, either, with the romantic side

of the quarrel--

“And for a single girl! we offer seven.”

Reproach and argument are alike in vain. The hero listens patiently and

courteously; but nothing shall move him from his resolution, unless

Hector, the godlike, shall carry fire and sword even to the ships and

tents of the Myrmidons; a venture which, he thinks, the Trojan prince,

with all his hardihood, will pause before he makes.

With downcast hearts the envoys return to Agamemnon; the aged Phœnix

alone remaining behind, at Achilles’ special request, to accompany him

when he shall set sail for home. Great consternation falls on the

assembled chiefs when they learn the failure of their overtures; only

Diomed, chivalrous as ever, laments that they should have stooped to ask

grace at such a churlish hand. Let Achilles go or stay as he will: for

themselves--let every man refresh himself with food and wine--“for

therein do lie both strength and courage”--and then betake themselves to

their no less needful rest: ready, so soon as “the rosy-fingered dawn”

appears, to set the battle fearlessly in array, in front of their ships

and tents, against this redoubtable Hector.

But

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

There is no rest for the King of Men, who has the fate of a national

armament on his soul. He looks forth upon the plain, where the thousand

watchfires of the enemy are blazing out into the night, and hears the

confused hum of their thick-lying battalions, and the sounds of the wild

Eastern music with which they are enlivening their revels, and

celebrating their victory by anticipation. He rises from his troubled

couch, determined to hold a night-council with Nestor and other chiefs

of mark. He is donning his armour, when he is visited by his brother

Menelaus--for he too has no rest, thinking of the dire straits into

which in his sole cause the armies of Greece are driven. The royal

brothers go in different directions through the camp, and quietly rouse

all the most illustrious captains. Nestor is the guiding spirit in the

council, as before. He advises a reconnoissance of the enemy’s lines

under cover of the darkness. The office of a spy, be it remembered, was

reckoned in these old times, as in the days of the Hebrew commonwealth,

a service of honour as well as of danger; and the kings and chiefs of

the Greeks no more thought it beneath their dignity than Gideon did in

the case of the Midianites. The man who could discover for them the

counsels of Hector would win for himself not only a solid reward, but an

immortal name--

“High as heaven in all men’s mouths

Should be his praise, and ample his reward;

For every captain of a ship should give

A coal-black ewe, and at her foot a lamb,

A prize beyond compare: and high should be

His place at banquets and at solemn feasts.”

Diomed straightway volunteers for the adventure, and out of the many

chiefs who offer themselves as his comrade, he chooses Ulysses. So--not

without due prayer to Heaven--valour and subtlety go forth together on

their perilous errand.

Meanwhile the same idea has occurred to Hector; he too would learn the

counsels of his enemies. One Dolon--a young warrior who has a fine taste

for horses, but is otherwise of somewhat feminine type (Homer tells us

he was the only brother of five sisters), and whose main qualification

is fleetness of foot--is tempted to undertake the enterprise on a

somewhat singular condition--that he shall have as his prize the more

than mortal horses of Achilles, when, as he doubts not will be soon the

case, the spoils of the conquered Greeks shall come to be divided. And

Hector, with equal confidence, swears “by his sceptre” that they shall

be his and none other’s. Wrapped in a cloak of wolfskin, and wearing a

cap of marten’s fur instead of a helmet, he too steals out into the

night. He does not escape the keen vision of Ulysses. The Greek spies

crouch behind some dead bodies, and allow him to pass them, when they

rise and cut off his retreat to the Trojan camp. At first he thinks they

are Trojans, sent after him by Hector;

“But when they came a spear-cast off, or less,

He knew them for his foes, and slipt away

With lithe knees flying: and they behind him press.

As when with jaggèd teeth two dogs of prey

Hang steadily behind, to seize and slay,

Down the green woods, a wild fawn or a hare,

That shrieking flies them; on his track so lay

Odysseus and the son of Tydeus there,

Winding him out from Troy, and never swerved a hair.” (W.)

Their aim is to take him alive. Diomed at last gets within an easy

spear-cast--

“Then, hurling, he so ruled his aim, the spear

Whizzed by the neck, then sank into the ground.

He, trembling in his teeth, and white with fear,

Stood: from his mouth there came a chattering sound.

They panting, as he wept, his arms enwound.

‘Take me alive, and sell me home,’ cried he;

‘Brass, iron, and fine gold are with me found.

Glad will my father render countless fee,

If living by the ships they bear him news of me.’” (W.)

Ulysses parleys with the unhappy youth, and drags from his terrified

lips not only the secret of his errand, but the disposition of the

Trojan forces,--most convenient information for their own movements.

Especially, he tells them where they might find an easy prey, such as

his own soul would love. Rhesus, king of the Thracian allies, has his

camp apart--

“No steeds that e’er I saw,

For size and beauty, can with his compare;

Whiter than snow, and swifter than the wind.”

The unwilling treachery does not save his wretched life. Ulysses

sarcastically admires his choice of a reward--

“High soared thy hopes indeed, that thought to win

The horses of Achilles; hard are they

For mortal man to harness or control,

Save for Achilles’ self, the goddess-born.”

Then--with the cruel indifference to human life which marks every one of

Homer’s heroes--he severs his head from his body.

Following the directions given by Dolon, the two Greeks make their way

first to the quarters of the Thracian contingent. Swiftly and silently

Diomed despatches the king and twelve of his warriors, as they sleep,

while Ulysses drives off the snow-white horses. With these trophies they

return safe to the Greek camp, where they are cordially welcomed, though

it must be admitted they have gained but little insight into the designs

of Hector.[19]

CHAPTER VII.

THE THIRD BATTLE.

With the morrow’s dawn begins the third and great battle, at the Greek

lines, which occupies from the eleventh to the eighteenth book of the

poem. Agamemnon is the hero of the earlier part of the day, and Hector

is warned by Jupiter not to hazard his own person in the battle, unless

the Greek king is wounded; which at last he is, by the spear of a son of

Antenor. Ulysses and Diomed supply his place; until Paris, fighting in

somewhat coward fashion, crouching behind the monumental stone of the

national hero Ilus, pins Diomed through the right heel to the ground

with an arrow. Ulysses stands manfully at bay almost alone amidst a host

of enemies, holding his ground, though he too is wounded, till Ajax

comes to his aid. Still the Greeks have the worst of it. The skilful

leech Machaon, amongst others, is wounded by an arrow from the bow of

Paris: till even Achilles, watching the fight from the lofty prow of his

ship, sees his day of triumph and vengeance close at hand. He sends

Patroclus to the field--nominally to inquire who has just been carried

off wounded, but with the further object, we may suppose, of learning

the state of the case more thoroughly. Nestor, to whose tent Patroclus

comes, begs him to use his influence now with his angry chief, and

persuade him, if not to come to the rescue in person, at least to send

his stout Myrmidons to the aid of his countrymen, under Patroclus’ own

command.

Again the Greeks are driven within their intrenchments, and Hector and

the Trojan chariot-fighters pressing on them, attempt in their fierce

excitement even to make their horses leap the ditch and palisade. Foiled

in this, they dismount, and, forming in five detachments under the

several command of Hector, Helenus, Paris, Æneas, and Asius son of

Hyrtacus, they attack the stockade at five points at once. Asius alone

refuses to quit his chariot; and choosing the quarter where a gate is

still left open to receive the Greek fugitives, he drives full at the

narrow entrance. But in that gateway on either hand stand two stalwart

warders, Leonteus and Polypates. The latter is the son of the mighty

hero Pirithous, friend and comrade of Hercules, and both are of the

renowned race of the Lapithæ. Gallantly the two champions keep the

dangerous post against all comers, while their friends from the top of

the rampart shower huge stones upon their assailants. Even Hector at his

point of attack can make no impression: and as his followers vainly

strive to pass the ditch, an omen from heaven strikes them with

apprehension as to the final issue. An eagle, carrying off a huge

serpent through the air, is bitten by the reptile, and drops it,

writhing and bleeding, in the midst of the combatants. Polydamas points

it out to Hector, and reads in it a warning that their victory will be

at best a dearly-bought one. Hector rebukes him for his weakness in

putting faith in portents. The noble words in which the poet sums up

Hector’s creed in such matters have passed into a proverb with patriots

of every age and nation--

“The best of omens is our country’s cause.”

Sarpedon the Lycian, who claims none less than Jupiter for his father,

has taken chief command of the Trojan auxiliaries, and, gallantly

seconded by his countryman Glaucus, sweeps “like a black storm” on the

tower where Mnestheus, the Athenian, commands, and is like to have

carried it, when Glaucus falls wounded by an arrow from Teucer. The

slaughter is terrible on both sides, and the ditch and palisade are red

with blood. “The balance of the fight hangs even;” until at last the

Trojan prince lifts a huge fragment of rock, and heaves it at the wooden

gates which bar the entrance at his point of attack.

“This way and that the severed portals flew

Before the crashing missile; dark as night

His low’ring brow, great Hector sprang within;

Bright flashed the brazen armour on his breast,

As through the gates, two javelins in his hand,

He sprang; the gods except, no power might meet

That onset; blazed his eyes with lurid fire.

Then to the Trojans, turning to the throng,

He called aloud to scale the lofty wall;

They heard, and straight obeyed; some scaled the wall;

Some through the strong-built gates continuous poured;

While in confusion irretrievable

Fled to their ships the panic-stricken Greeks.” (D.)

Neptune has been watching the fight from the wooded heights of

Samothrace, and sees the imminent peril of his friends. “In four mighty

strides”--the woods and mountains trembling beneath his feet--he reaches

the bay of Œge, in Achaia, where far in the depths lie his shining

palaces of gold. There the sea-god mounts his chariot, yoking

“Beneath his car the brazen-footed steeds,

Of swiftest flight, with manes of flowing gold.

All clad in gold, the golden lash he grasped

Of curious work, and, mounting on his car,

Skimmed o’er the waves; from all the depths below

Gambolled around the monsters of the deep,

Acknowledging their king; the joyous sea

Parted her waves; swift flew the bounding steeds;

Nor was the brazen axle wet with spray,

When to the ships of Greece their lord they bore.” (D.)

He takes the form of the soothsayer Calchas, and in his person rallies

the discomfited Greeks, and summons the greater and the lesser Ajax to

the rescue. Both feel a sudden accession of new vigour and courage; Ajax

Oileus detects the divinity of their visitor, as the seeming Calchas

turns to depart. The two chiefs quickly gather round them a phalanx of

their comrades.

“Spear close by spear, and shield by shield o’erlaid,

Buckler to buckler pressed, and helm to helm,

And man to man; the horse-hair plumes above,

That nodded on the warriors’ glittering crests,

Each other touched, so closely massed they stood.

Backward by many a stalwart hand were drawn

The spears, in act to hurl; their eyes and minds

Turned to the front, and eager for the fray.” (D.)

Hector’s career is stayed. Ajax the Lesser brings into play his band of

Locrian bowmen, of little use in the open field, but good when they are

under cover.

“Theirs were not the hearts

To brook th’ endurance of the standing fight;

Nor had they brass-bound helms with horse-hair plume,

Nor ample shields they bore, nor ashen spear,

But came to Troy in bows and twisted slings

Of woollen cloth confiding.”

The galling storm of their arrows throws confusion into the Trojan

ranks. Helenas and Deiphobus, Hector’s brothers, have already been led

off wounded: Asius son of Hyrtacus has found his trust in chariot and

horses vain, and lies dead within the Greek lines. But Hector still

presses on, and Paris shows that he can play the soldier on occasion as

successfully as the gallant. The Greeks, too, miss their leaders.

Agamemnon, Ulysses, Diomed, are all disabled for the time. The two

Ajaxes and Idomeneus of Crete do all that man can do. But the stockade

has been forced, and the fight is now round the ships,--the last hope of

bare safety for the Greek forces. If Hector burns them, as he boasts he

will, all means of retreat, all the long-cherished prospect of seeing

their homes again, are lost to them. In a hasty conference with his

wounded companions beside his galley, Agamemnon, suffering and

dispirited, once more counsels retreat before it be too late. If they

can but hold out till nightfall, then, under cover of the darkness, he

proposes to take the sea. Those vessels which lie close to the shore may

be launched at once without discovery from the enemy, and kept out at

anchor: the rest can follow when the Trojans have, as usual, withdrawn

from immediate attack, as soon as the shades of evening make the

distinction hazardous between friend and foe. Ulysses and Diomed

overrule the proposal; and the wounded leaders return to the scene of

combat, unable to take an active part, but inspiriting their men from

safe posts of observation.

The interlude of comedy is furnished again by the denizens of Olympus.

Juno has watched with delight the successful efforts of Neptune to rally

the Greeks against Hector and the hateful Trojans; but she is in an

agony of apprehension lest Jupiter, who has his attention just now

occupied in Thrace, should interfere at this critical moment, and still

grant the victory to Hector. She determines to put in force all her

powers of blandishment, and to coax the Thunderer to spend in her

company those precious hours which are laden with the fate of her

Greeks. She is not content with her ordinary powers of fascination: she

applies to the goddess of love for the loan of her magic girdle,--

“Her broidered cestus, wrought with every charm

To win the heart; there Love, there young Desire,

There fond Discourse, and there Persuasion dwelt,

Which oft enthrals the mind of wisest men.”

It certainly enthrals the mind of the sovereign of Olympus; who, in all

cases where female attractions were concerned, was even as the most

foolish of mortals. Transfigured by the cestus of Venus, his queen

appears to him in a halo of celestial charms which are irresistible. In

her company he speedily forgets the wretched squabbles of the creatures

upon earth. Juno has bribed the god of sleep also to become her

accomplice; and the dread king is soon locked in profound repose.

Then Neptune seizes his opportunity, and heads the Greeks in person.

Agamemnon, disregarding his recent wound, is seen once more in the front

of the battle. Ajax meets Hector hand to hand, receives his spear full

in his breast just where his cross-belts meet, and so escapes unwounded.

As the Trojan prince draws back to recover himself, the giant Greek

upheaves a huge stone that has shored up one of the galleys, and hurls

it with main strength against his breast. “Like an oak of the forest

struck by lightning” Hector falls prone in the dust. With shouts of

exultation, Ajax and his comrades rush to crown their victory by

stripping his armour; but the great chiefs of the enemy,--Æneas,

Polydamas, the Lycian captains Sarpedon and Glaucus--gather round and

lock their shields in front of the fallen hero, while others bear him

aside out of the battle, still in a death-like swoon, to where his

chariot stands. Dismayed at the fall of their great leader, the Trojans

give ground; the trench is recrossed, and the Greeks breathe again.

Jupiter awakes from sleep just in time to see the mischief that has been

done; the Trojans in flight, the Greeks with Neptune at their head

pursuing; Hector lying senseless by the side of his chariot, still

breathing heavily, and vomiting blood from his bruised chest, and

surrounded by his anxious comrades. He turns wrathfully upon Juno--it is

her work, he knows. He reminds her of former penalties which she had

brought upon herself by deceiving him.

“Hast thou forgotten how in former times

I hung thee from on high, and to thy feet

Attached two ponderous anvils, and thy hands

With golden fetters bound which none might break?

There didst thou hang amid the clouds of heaven:

Through all Olympus’ breadth the gods were wroth;

Yet dared not one approach to set thee free.” (D.)

He does not proceed, however, to exercise any such barbarous conjugal

discipline on this occasion, and is readily appeased by his queen’s

assurance that the interference of Neptune was entirely on his own

proper motion. He condescends even to explain why he desires to give a

temporary triumph to the Trojans: it is that, in accordance with his

sworn promise to Thetis, he may avenge the insult offered to her son

Achilles, by teaching the Greeks their utter helplessness without him.

The Goddess of the Rainbow is sent to warn Neptune, on pain of the

Thunderer’s displeasure, to quit the fight. The sea-king demurs. “Was

not a fair partition made, in the primeval days, between the three

brother-gods, of the realms of Air, and Sea, and Darkness? and is not

Earth common ground to all? Why is not Jupiter content with his own

lawful domains, and by what right does he assume to dictate to a

brother--and a brother-king?” Iris, however, calms him; he is perfectly

right in theory, she admits; but in practice he will find his elder

brother too strong for him. So the sea-god, in sulky acquiescence,

leaves the scene of battle, and plunges down into the depths of his own

dominion. Phœbus Apollo, on the other hand, receives Jupiter’s

permission to aid the Trojans. He sweeps down from Olympus to the spot

where Hector lies, now slowly reviving. The hero recognises his

celestial visitor, and feels at once his strength restored, and his

ardour for the battle reawakened. To the consternation of the Greeks, he

reappears in the field, fierce and vigorous as before. But he no longer

comes alone; in his front moves Phœbus Apollo,--

“His shoulders veiled in cloud; his arm sustained

The awful Ægis, dread to look on, hung

With shaggy tassels round and dazzling bright,

Which Vulcan, skilful workman, gave to Jove,

To scatter terror ’mid the souls of men.” (D.)

When the sun-god flashes this in the faces of the Greeks, heart and

spirit fail them. Stalking in the van of the Trojans, he leads them up

once more against the embankment, and, planting his mighty foot upon

it, levels a wide space for the passage of the chariots,--

“Easy, as when a child upon the beach,

In wanton play, with hands and feet o’erthrows

The mound of sand which late in sport he raised.”

The habits and pursuits of grown-up men change with the passing

generation; but the children of Homer’s day might play with our own, and

understand each other’s ways perfectly.

Chariots and footmen press through the breach pell-mell, and again the

battle rages round the Greek galleys. Standing on their high decks, the

Greeks maintain the struggle gallantly with the long boarding-pikes, as

we should call them, kept on board for use in such emergencies. Ajax’

galley is attacked by Hector in person; but the Greek chief stands

desperately at bay, wielding a huge pike thirty-three feet long, and his

brother Teucer plies his arrows with fatal effect upon the crowded

assailants: until Jupiter, alarmed lest Hector should be struck, snaps

his bowstring in sunder. Hector calls loudly for fire to burn the

vessels, and one warrior after another, torch in hand, makes the attempt

at the cost of his life, until twelve lie biting the sand, slain by the

huge weapon of Ajax.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE DEATH OF PATROCLUS.

Patroclus, sitting in the tent of the wounded Eurypylus, sees the

imminent peril of his countrymen. He cannot bear the sight, and taking

hasty leave of his friend, hurries back to the quarters of Achilles, and

stands before him in an agony of silent tears. At first the hero affects

to chide his follower for such girlish sorrow--what cares he for the

Greeks? It is plain, however, that he does care; and when Patroclus, in

very outspoken terms, upbraids him for his obduracy, and asks that, even

if the dark doom that hangs over him makes his chief unwilling to take

the field in person, he will at least send him with the Myrmidons to the

rescue, Achilles at once consents. Patroclus shall go, clad in his

armour, that so perchance the Trojans may be deceived, and think that

they see the well-known crest of Achilles himself once more leading the

fight. Only he warns him not to advance too far; to be content with

rescuing the galleys, and not attempt to press his victory home to the

walls of Troy; in that case he will find the gods of the enemy turn

their wrath against him. In spite of his assumed indifference, Achilles

is intently watching the combatants in the distance, and sees the

flames rising in the air from the galley of Ajax. He can no longer

restrain his feelings, but hurries his comrade forth. Patroclus puts on

the harness of his chief, and takes his sword and shield: only the

mighty spear he forbears to touch;--

“None save Achilles’ self that spear could poise,

The far-famed Pelian ash, which to his sire,

On Pelion’s summit felled, to be the bane

Of mightiest chiefs, the centaur Chiron gave.”

He mounts the hero’s chariot, driven by the noble Automedon, and drawn

by the three horses, Xanthus, Balius, and Pedasus--or as we should call

them, Chestnut, Dapple, and Swift-foot. The battalions of the Myrmidons

eagerly gather round their leaders,--even old Phœnix taking command of

one detachment. Achilles himself gives them a few fiery words of

exhortation. “They have long chafed at their enforced idleness, and

clamoured for the battle; lo! there lies the opportunity they have

longed for.” Then, standing in the midst, he pours from his most costly

goblet the solemn libation to Jove, and prays of him for Patroclus

victory and a safe return. The poet tells us, with that licence of

prognostication which has been considerably abused by some modern

writers of fiction, that half the prayer was heard, and half denied.

“Like a pack of ravening wolves, hungering for their prey,” the

Myrmidons launch themselves against the enemy. The Trojans recognise, as

they believe, in the armed charioteer who heads them, the terrible

Achilles, and consternation spreads through their ranks. Even Hector,

though still fighting gallantly, is borne back over the stockade, and

the ditch is filled with broken chariots and struggling horses. Back

towards the Trojan lines rolls the tide of battle. Sarpedon, the great

Lycian chief, own son to Jupiter, falls by the spear of Patroclus. The

ruler of Olympus has hesitated for a while whether he shall interpose to

save him; but his fated term of life is come, and there is a mysterious

Destiny in this Homeric mythology, against which even Jupiter seems

powerless. All that he can do for his offspring is to insure for his

body the rites of burial; and by his order the twin brothers, Sleep and

Death, carry off the corpse to his native shore of Lycia.

But Patroclus has forgotten the parting caution of Achilles. Flushed

with his triumph, he follows up the pursuit even to the walls of Troy.

But there Apollo keeps guard. Thrice the Greek champion in defiance

smites upon the battlements, and thrice the god shakes the terrible Ægis

in his face. A fourth time the Greek lifts his spear, when an awful

voice warns him that neither for him, nor yet for his mightier master

Achilles, is it written in the fates to take Troy. Awe-struck, he draws

back from the wall, but only to continue his career of slaughter among

the Trojans. Apollo meets him in the field, strips from him his helmet

and his armour, and shivers his spear in his hand. The Trojan Euphorbus,

seeing him at this disadvantage, stabs him from behind, and Hector,

following him as he retreats, drives his spear through his body. As the

Trojan prince stands over his victim, exulting after the fashion of all

Homeric heroes in what seems to our taste a barbarous and boastful

spirit, Patroclus with his dying breath foretells that his slayer shall

speedily meet his own fate by the avenging hand of Achilles. Hector

spurns the prophecy, and rushes after the charioteer Automedon, whom

the immortal horses carry off safe from his pursuit. Then donning the

armour of Achilles, so lately worn by Patroclus, he leads on the Trojans

to seize the dead body, which Menelaus is gallantly defending. After a

long and desperate contest, the Greeks, locking their shields together

in close phalanx, succeed in carrying it off, the two Ajaxes keeping the

assailants at bay. Jupiter, in pity to the dead hero, casts a veil of

darkness round him. But this embarrasses the movements of friends as

well as enemies, and gives rise to a characteristic outburst on the part

of Ajax, often quoted. He can fight best when he sees his way. “Give us

but light, O Jove, and in the light, if thou seest fit, destroy us!”

We have now reached the crisis of the story. The wrath of Achilles

against Agamemnon wanes and pales before the far more bitter wrath which

now fills his whole soul against Hector, as the slayer of his comrade.

Young Antilochus, son of Nestor, brings the mournful tidings to his

tent, where he sits already foreboding the result, as he sees the Greeks

crowding back to their galleys from the field in front of Troy. His

grief is frantic--he tears his hair, and heaps dust upon his head, after

a fashion which strongly suggests the Eastern character of the tale. His

goddess-mother, Thetis “of the silver feet,” hears him,

“Beside her aged father where she sat,

In the deep ocean-caves,”

and comes with all her train of sea-nymphs to console him, as when

before he sat weeping with indignation at the insult of Agamemnon. In

vain she strives to comfort him with the thought that his insulted

honour has been fully satisfied--that the Greeks have bitterly rued

their former treatment of him. He feels only the loss of Patroclus, and

curses the hour in which he was born. All that he longs for now is

vengeance upon Hector. Thetis sorrowfully reminds him that it is written

in the book of fate that when Hector falls, his own last hour is near at

hand. Be it so, is his reply--death comes in turn to all men, and he

will meet it as he may. But he cannot go forth to battle without armour;

and the goddess promises that by the morrow’s dawn, Vulcan, the immortal

craftsman, shall furnish him with harness of proof.

The Greeks have fought their way to their vessels, step by step, with

the dead body of Patroclus. But Hector with his Trojans has pressed them

close all the way, and even when at the Greek lines seizes the corpse by

the feet. Iris flies to Achilles with a message from Juno--will he see

his dead friend given as a prey to the dogs and vultures?--He is without

armour, true; but there is no need for him to adventure himself among

the combatants; let him only show himself, let the Trojans but hear his

voice, and it is enough. He does so; standing aloft upon the rampart,

while Pallas throws her ægis over him, and surrounds his head with a

halo of flashing light, he lifts his mighty voice and thrice shouts

aloud. Panic seizes the whole host of Troy, and while they give ground

in dismay, the dead Patroclus is borne off to the tent of Achilles.

Night falls on the plain, and separates the combatants. The Trojans,

before their evening meal, hold an anxious council, in which Polydamas,

as great in debate as Hector is in the field, advises that they should

now retire within their walls. Achilles, it is evident, will head the

Greeks in the morning, and who shall stand before him? But the wise

counsel of Polydamas meets the same fate as that of Ahithophel; Heaven

will not suffer men to listen to it. Minerva perverts the understandings

of the Trojans, and they prefer the rasher exhortations of Hector, who

urges them at all hazards to keep the field.

Thetis, meanwhile, has sought out Vulcan, and bespoken his skill in the

forging of new armour for her son. The lame god will work for her, she

knows; for in the day when his cruel mother Juno, in wrath at his

marvellous ugliness, cast him down from Olympus, she with her

sister-goddess Eurynome had nursed him in their bosom till he grew

strong. She finds him now hard at work at his forges, in the brazen

halls which he has made for himself in heaven. He is completing at this

moment some marvellous machinery--twenty tripods mounted on wheels of

gold (the earliest hint of velocipedes), which are to move of

themselves, and carry him to and fro to the assembly of the gods.

Another marvel, too, is to be seen in the Fire-king’s establishment,

which has long been the desideratum of modern households, but which

modern mechanical science has as yet failed to invent--automaton

servants, worked by machinery.

“In form as living maids, but wrought in gold,

Instinct with consciousness, with voice endued,

And strength, and skill from heavenly teachers drawn;

These waited duteous at the monarch’s side.”

Willingly, at the request of the sea-goddess, Vulcan plies his immortal

art. Helmet with crest of gold, breastplate “brighter than the flash of

fire,” and the pliant greaves that mould themselves to the limb, are

soon completed. But the marvel of marvels is the shield. On this the

god bestows all his skill, and the, poet his most graphic description.

It is covered with figures of the most elaborate design, wrought in

brass, and tin, and gold, and silver. In its centre are the sun, the

moon, and all the host of heaven: round the rim flows the mighty

ocean-river, which in Homeric as in Eastern mythology encompasses the

earth; and on its embossed surface, crowded with figures, is embodied an

epitome of human life, such as life was in the days of Homer. The tale

is told in twelve compartments, containing each a scene of peace or war.

Three groups represent a city in time of peace: a wedding procession

with music and dancing, a dispute in the market-place, and a reference

to the judgment of the elders gathered in council. Three represent a

city in time of war: a siege, an ambuscade, and a battle. Then follow

three scenes of outdoor country life: ploughing, the harvest, and the

vintage. The lord of the harvest stands looking on at his reapers, like

Boaz. In the vintage scene, the art of the immortal workman is minutely

described. The vines are wrought in gold, the props are of silver, the

grape-bunches are of a purple black, and there is a trench round of some

dark-hued metal, crowned by a palisade of bright tin. Three pastoral

groups complete the circle. First, a herd of oxen with herdsmen and

their dogs, attacked by lions; secondly, flocks feeding in a deep

valley, with the folds and shepherds’ huts in the distance; and lastly,

a festival dance of men and maidens in holiday attire, with the “divine

bard,” without whom no festival is complete, singing his lays to his

harp in the midst, and two gymnasts performing their feats for the

amusement of the crowd of lookers-on. If any reader should have imagined

that Homer’s song of (it may be) three thousand years ago was rude and

inartistic, he has but to read, in the version of any of our best

translators, this description of the Shield of Achilles, to be convinced

that the poet understood his work to the full as well as the immortal

craftsman whom he represents as having wrought it. We need not trouble

ourselves with the difficulty of that French critic, who doubted whether

so many subjects could really be represented on any shield of manageable

size--like Goldsmith’s rustics who marvelled, in the case of the village

schoolmaster,

“That one small head could carry all he knew.”

It is only necessary to point to the clever design of Flaxman for its

realisation, and its actual embodiment (with the moderate diameter of

three feet) in the shield cast by Pitts.

CHAPTER IX.

THE RETURN OF ACHILLES.

With a fierce delight Achilles gazes on the work of the Olympian

armourer, before the dazzling brightness of which even the Myrmidons

veil their faces. He sets forth at once for the tents of Agamemnon; and,

taking his way along the shore, calls the leaders to battle as he passes

each man’s galley. The news of his coming spreads fast and far, and

every man, from the highest to the lowest, even those who never quitted

the ship on any other occasion--

“The steersmen who the vessels’ rudders hold,

The very stewards who served the daily bread”--

flock to the central rendezvous to welcome back the champion of the

Achæans. He is as impulsive and outspoken in his reconciliation as in

his wrath. There is no need of mediation now between himself and

Agamemnon. He accosts the king with a noble simplicity:

“Great son of Atreus, what hath been the gain

To thee or me, since heart-consuming strife

Hath fiercely raged between us, for a girl--

Who would to heaven had died by Dian’s shafts

That day when from Lyrnessus’ captured town

I bore her off, so had not many a Greek

Bitten the bloody dust, by hostile hands

Subdued, while I in anger stood aloof.

Great was the gain to Troy; but Greece, methinks,

Will long retain the memory of our feud.

Yet pass we that; and though our hearts be sore,

Still let us school our angry spirits down.

My wrath I here abjure.” (D.)

Agamemnon, for his part, magnanimously admits his error; laying the

chief blame, however, upon Jupiter and Fate, who blinded the eyes of his

understanding. The peace-offerings are produced and accepted, though

Achilles only chafes at anything which can delay his vengeance. Ulysses

strongly urges the necessity of a substantial meal for the whole army;

“For none throughout the day till set of sun,

Fasting from food, may bear the toils of war;

His spirit may be eager for the fray,

Yet are his limbs by slow degrees weighed down.”

Achilles schools himself into patience while the rest act upon this

prosaic but prudent counsel; but for himself, he will neither eat nor

drink, nor wash his blood-stained hands, till he has avenged the death

of his comrade. So he sits apart in his grief, while the rest are at the

banquet: Minerva, by Jupiter’s command, infusing into his body ambrosia

and nectar, to sustain his strength. Another true mourner is Briseis.

The first sight which meets the captive princess on her return to the

Myrmidon camp is the bloody corpse of Patroclus. She throws herself upon

it in an agony of tears. He, in the early days of her captivity, had

spoken kind and cheering words, and had been a friend in time of

trouble. So, too, Menelaus briefly says of him--“He knew how to be kind

to all men.” This glimpse which the poet gives us of the gentler

features of the dead warrior’s character is touching enough, when we

remember the utter disregard of an enemy’s or a captive’s feelings shown

not only by Homer’s heroes, but by those of the older Jewish Scriptures.

When all is ready for the battle, Achilles dons the armour of Vulcan,

and draws from its case the Centaur’s gift,--the ashen spear of Mount

Pelion, which even Patroclus, it will be remembered, had not ventured to

take in hand. Thus armed, he mounts his chariot, drawn by the two

immortal steeds, Xanthus and Balius--for their mortal yoke-fellow had

been slain in the battle in which Patroclus fell. As he mounts, in the

bitter spirit which leads him to blame the whole world for the death of

his friend, he cannot forbear a taunt to his horses--he trusts they will

not leave him on the field, as they left Patroclus. Then the chestnut,

inspired by Juno, for once finds a human voice, and exculpates himself

and his comrade. It was no fault of theirs; it was the doom of

Patroclus, and Achilles’ own doom draws nigh. This day they will bring

him back in safety; but the end is at hand.

Unlike Hector, Achilles knows and foresees his doom clearly; but, like

Hector, he will meet it unflinchingly. Pope’s version of his reply is

deservedly admired. Xanthus has uttered his warning;

“Then ceased for ever, by the Furies tied,

His fateful voice. Th’ intrepid chief replied

With unabated rage--‘So let it be!

Portents and prodigies are lost on me;

I know my fate; to die, to see no more

My much-loved parents and my native shore;

Enough--when Heaven ordains, I sink in night;

Now perish Troy!’ he said, and rushed to fight.”

In the renewed battle which ensues, the gods, by express permission of

their sovereign, take part. Juno, Neptune, Minerva, Mercury, and Vulcan

assist the Greeks: Mars, Venus, Apollo, Latona, and Diana join the

Trojans. Their interference seems, at least to our modern taste, to

assist in no way the action of the poem, and merely tends to weaken for

the time the human interest. We must be content to assume that upon a

Greek audience the impression was different. The only effect which these

immortal allies produce upon the fortunes of the day is a negative one;

Apollo incites Æneas to encounter Achilles, and when he is in imminent

danger, Neptune conveys him away in a mist. Apollo performs the same

office for Hector, who also engages the same terrible adversary, in the

hope of avenging upon him the death of his young brother Polydorus.

Disappointed in both his greater antagonists, Achilles vents his wrath

in indiscriminate slaughter. Driving through the disordered host of the

Trojans, his chariot wheels and axle steeped in blood, he cuts the mass

of fugitives in two, and drives part of them into the shallows of the

river Scamander. Leaping down from his chariot, he wades into the river,

and there continues his career of slaughter, sword in hand. Twelve

Trojan youths he takes alive and hands them over to his followers;

sparing them for the present only to slay them hereafter as victims at

the funeral-pile to appease the shade of Patroclus. Another suppliant

for his mercy has a singular history. The young Lycaon, one of the many

sons of Priam, had been taken prisoner by him in one of his raids upon

Trojan territory, and sold as a slave in Lemnos. He had been ransomed

there and sent home to Troy, only twelve days before he fell into his

enemy’s hands again here in the bed of the Scamander. Achilles

recognises him, and cruelly taunts him with his reappearance: the dead

Trojans whom he has slain will surely next come to life again, if the

captives thus cross the seas to swell the ranks of his enemies. In vain

Lycaon pleads for his life, that he is not the son of the same mother as

Hector--that his brother Polydorus has just been slain, which may well

content the Greek’s vengeance. There is a gloomy irony in the words with

which Achilles rejects his prayer. Before Patroclus fell, he had spared

many a Trojan; but henceforth, all appeal to his mercy is vain--most of

all from a son of Priam. But, in fact, the wish to escape one’s fate he

holds to be utterly unreasonable;

“Thou too, my friend, must die--why vainly wail?

Dead is Patroclus too, thy better far--

Me too thou seest, how stalwart, tall, and fair,

Of noble sire and goddess-mother born,

Yet must I yield to death and stubborn fate,

Whene’er, at morn or noon or eve, the spear

Or arrow from the bow may reach my life.” (D.)

At last the great river-god--whom the gods call Xanthus, but men

Scamander--rises in his might, indignant at seeing his stream choked

with corpses, and stained with blood. He hurls the whole force of his

waves against Achilles, and the hero is fain to save himself by grasping

an elm that overhangs the bank, and so swinging himself to land. But

here Scamander pursues him, and, issuing from his banks, rolls in a

deluge over the plain. Even the soul of Achilles is terror-stricken at

this new aspect of death. Is he to die thus, like some vile churl--

“Borne down in crossing by a wintry brook?”

Neptune and Minerva appear to encourage him, and give him strength to

battle with the flood: and when Scamander summons his brother-river

Simois to his aid, Vulcan sends flames that scorch all the river-banks,

consuming the trees and shrubs that clothe them, and threatening to dry

up the very streams themselves. The river yields, and retires to his

banks, leaving Achilles free to pursue his victories. He drives the

Trojans inside their walls, and but that Apollo guards the gates, would

have entered the city in hot pursuit. Hector alone remains without--his

doom is upon him.

The gods, meanwhile, have entered the field of battle on their own

account, and contributed, as before, a ludicrous element to the action

of the poem. Minerva fells Mars the war-god to the ground with a huge

mass of rock, an ancient landmark, which she hurls against him; and he

lies covering “above seven hundred feet,” till Venus comes to his aid to

lead him from the field, when the terrible goddess strikes her to the

earth beside him. Juno shows the strength of those “white arms” which

the poet always assigns to her, by a terrible buffet which she bestows,

for no particular reason apparently, upon Diana, who drops her bow and

loses her arrows, and flies weeping to her father Jupiter. He, for his

part, has been watching the quarrels of his court and family with a

dignified amusement;--

“Jove as his sport the dreadful scene descries,

And views contending gods with careless eyes.” (P.)

Those philosophers who see a moral allegory in the whole of the Homeric

story, have supplied us with a key to the conduct and feelings of

Jupiter during this curious combat. “Jupiter, as the lord of nature, is

well pleased with the war of the gods--that is, of earth, sea, air,

&c.--because the harmony of all beings arises from that discord. Thus

heat and cold, moist and dry, are in a continual war, yet upon this

depends the fertility of the earth and the beauty of the creation. So

that Jupiter, who, according to the Greeks, is the soul of all, may well

be said to smile at this contention.”[20] Those readers who may not be

satisfied with this solution must be content to take the burlesque as it

stands.

CHAPTER X.

THE DEATH OF HECTOR.

Hector remains alone outside the Scæan gate, awaiting his great enemy.

In vain his aged father and mother from the walls entreat him to take

shelter within, like the rest of his countrymen. He will not meet the

just reproach of Polydamas, whose prudent counsel he rejected. The

deaths of his friends who have fallen in this terrible battle, which he

had insisted upon their risking, hang heavy on his soul. He, at least,

will do what he may for Troy. Yet he has no confidence in the result of

the encounter. If he were only sure that Achilles would listen, he would

even now offer to restore Helen, and so end this disastrous war. But he

feels it is too late; vengeance alone will now content Achilles.

“Not this the time, nor he the man with whom

By forest oak or rock, like youth and maid,

To hold light talk as youth and maid might hold.

Better to dare the fight, and know at once

For whom the vict’ry is decreed by Heaven.”

Achilles draws near. The courage which has never failed Hector before,

wholly deserts him now; he turns and flies, “like a dove from the

falcon.” Judged by any theory of modern heroism, his conduct is simply

indefensible. Critics tell us that the poet, in order to enhance the

glory of his chief hero, makes even the champion of Troy fear to face

him. But it is no compliment, in our modern eyes, to a victorious

warrior, to have it explained that his crowning victory was won over a

coward. Yet perhaps there was something of this feeling maintained even

by Englishmen in days not so very long gone by, when it was the popular

fashion to represent Frenchmen generally, and the great French general

in particular, as always running away from the English bayonets.

However, to Homer’s public it was evidently not incongruous or

derogatory to the heroic type of character, that sudden panic should

seize even the bravest in the presence of superior force. Hector, as has

been said, turns and flies for his life.

Thrice round the walls of the city, his friends looking on in horror at

the terrible race, he flies, with Achilles in pursuit. In each course he

tries to reach the gates, that his comrades may either open to him, or

at least cover him by launching their missiles from the walls against

his enemy. But still Achilles turns him back towards the plain, signing

to the Greeks to hurl no spear, nor to interfere in any way with his

single vengeance. The gods look down from Olympus with divided interest.

Jupiter longs to save him; but Minerva sternly reminds him of the dread

destiny--the Eternal Law--which even the Ruler of Olympus is bound to

reverence. Once more he lifts in heaven the golden scales, and finds

that Hector’s fate weighs down the balance. Then, at last, his guardian

Apollo leaves him. Minerva, on her part, comes to the aid of her

favourite Achilles with a stratagem, as little worthy of his renown (to

our view) as the sudden panic of Hector. She appears by the side of the

Trojan hero in the likeness of his brother Deiphobus, and bids him stand

and fight; they two, together, must surely be a match for Achilles.

Hector turns and challenges his adversary. One compact he tries to make,

in a few hurried words, before they encounter; let each promise, since

one must fall, to restore the dead body of his enemy in all honour to

his kindred. Achilles makes no reply but this:--

“Talk not to me of compacts; as ’tween men

And lions no firm concord can exist,

Nor wolves and lambs in harmony unite,

But ceaseless enmity between them dwells:

So not in friendly terms, nor compact firm,

Can thou and I unite, till one of us

Glut with his blood the mail-clad warrior Mars.

Mind thee of all thy fence; behoves thee now

To prove a spearman skilled, and warrior brave.

For thee escape is none; now, by my spear,

Hath Pallas doomed thy death: my comrade’s blood,

Which thou hast shed, shall all be now avenged.” (D.)

The spear launched with these words misses its mark: that of Hector

strikes full in the centre of his enemy’s shield, but it glances

harmlessly off from the fire-god’s workmanship. He looks round for

Deiphobus to hand him another; but the false Deiphobus has vanished,

and, too late, Hector detects the cruel deceit of the goddess. He will

die at least as a hero should. He draws his sword, and rushes on

Achilles. The wary Greek eyes him carefully as he comes on, and spies

the joint in his harness where the breastplate meets the throat. Through

that fatal spot he drives his spear, and the Trojan falls to the ground

mortally wounded, but yet preserving the power of speech. As his

conqueror stands over him cruelly vaunting, and vowing to give his body

to the dogs and to the vultures, he makes a last appeal to his mercy.

“By the heads of his parents” he beseeches him to spare this last

indignity; the ransom which his father Priam will offer shall be ample

for one poor corpse. But the wrath of Achilles has become for the

present mere savage madness. Neither prayer nor ransom shall avail in

this matter. Hector’s last words are prophetic:--

“I know thee well, nor did I hope

To change thy purpose; iron is thy soul.

But see that on thy head I bring not down

The wrath of heaven, when by the Scæan gate

The hand of Paris, with Apollo’s aid,

Brave warrior as thou art, shall strike thee down.” (D.)

The only glimpse of nobility which Achilles shows throughout the whole

scene is in his stoical answer:--

“Die thou! my fate I then shall meet, whene’er

Jove and th’ immortal gods shall so decree.”

What follows is mere brutality. The Greeks crowd round, and drive their

weapons into the senseless body.

“And one to other looked, and said, ‘Good faith,

Hector is easier far to handle now,

Than when erewhile he wrapped our ships in fire.’”

Does it need here to do more than recall the too well remembered

sequel--how the savage victor pierced the heels of his dead enemy, and

so fastened the body to his chariot, and dragged him off to his ships,

in full sight of his agonised parents? how

“A cloud of dust the trailing body raised;

Loose hung his glossy hair; and in the dust

Was laid that noble head, so graceful once.”

Or how the miserable Priam, grovelling on the floor of his palace,

besought his weeping friends to suffer him to rush out of the gates, and

implore the mercy of the merciless Achilles? Less horrible, if not less

piteous, is the picture of Andromache:--

“To her no messenger

Had brought the tidings, that without the walls

Remained her husband; in her house withdrawn,

A web she wove, all purple, double woof,

With varied flowers in rich embroidery,

And to her neat-haired maids she gave command

To place the largest caldrons on the fires,

That with warm baths, returning from the fight,

Hector might be refreshed; unconscious she,

That by Achilles’ hand, with Pallas’ aid,

Far from the bath, was godlike Hector slain.

The sounds of wailing reached her from the tower.

* * * * *

Then from the house she rushed, like one distract,

With beating heart; and with her went her maids.

But when the tower she reached, where stood the crowd,

And mounted on the wall, and looked around,

And saw the body trailing in the dust,

Which the fleet steeds were dragging to the ships,

A sudden darkness overspread her eyes;

Backward she fell, and gasped her spirit away.

Far off were flung th’ adornments of her head,

The net, the fillet, and the woven bands;

The nuptial veil by golden Venus given,

That day when Hector of the glancing helm

Led from Eëtion’s house his wealthy bride.

The sisters of her husband round her pressed,

And held, as in the deadly swoon she lay.” (D.)

The body is dragged off to the ships, and flung in the dust in front of

the bier on which Patroclus lies. And now, at last, when he has been

fully avenged, the due honours shall be paid to his beloved remains,

while the dogs and vultures feast on those of Hector. Thrice in slow

procession, with a mournful chant, the Myrmidons lead their horses

round the bier. While Achilles sleeps the deep sleep of exhaustion after

the long day’s battle, the shade of his dead friend appears to him, and

chides him for leaving him so long unburied, a wandering ghost in the

gloom below.

“Sleep’st thou, Achilles, mindless of thy friend,

Neglecting not the living, but the dead?

Hasten my fun’ral rites, that I may pass

Through Hades’ gloomy gates; ere those be done,

The spirits and spectres of departed men

Drive me far from them, nor allow to cross

Th’ abhorred river; but forlorn and sad

I wander through the widespread realms of night.

And give me now thy hand, whereon to weep;

For never more, when laid upon the pyre,

Shall I return from Hades; never more,

Apart from all our comrades, shall we two,

As friends, sweet counsel take; for me, stern Death,

The common lot of man, has ope’d his mouth;

Thou too, Achilles, rival of the gods,

Art destined here beneath the walls of Troy

To meet thy doom; yet one thing must I add,

And make, if thou wilt grant it, one request:

Let not my bones be laid apart from thine,

Achilles, but together, as our youth

Was spent together in thy father’s house.” (D.)

As eager now to do honour to Achilles as he was before to insult him,

Agamemnon has despatched a strong force at early dawn to cut down wood

for a huge funeral pile. The burial rites are grandly savage. In long

procession and in full panoply the Myrmidons bear the dead hero to the

pile, and the corpse is covered with the long locks of hair which every

warrior in turn, Achilles first, cuts off as an offering to the gods

below. Four chariot-horses, and two dogs “that had fed at their master’s

board,” are slain upon the pile, to follow him, in case he should have

need of them, into the dark and unknown country: and last, the twelve

Trojan captives, according to his barbarous vow, are slaughtered by

Achilles in person, and laid upon the pile. The winds of heaven are

solemnly invoked to fan the flames, which roar and blaze all night; and

all night Achilles pours copious libations of wine from a golden goblet.

With wine also the embers are quenched in the morning, and the bones of

Patroclus are carefully collected and placed in a golden urn, to await

the day, which Achilles foresees close at hand, when they shall be

buried under one mound with his own.

There follow the funeral games. First, the chariot-race, in which Diomed

carries off an easy victory with the Trojan horses which he captured

from Æneas. An easy victory, because the goddess Minerva not only breaks

the pole of Eumelus, his most formidable rival, but hands Diomed back

his whip when he drops it: interpreted by our realistic critics to mean,

that prudence bids him take a second whip as a reserve. The old

“horse-tamer,” Nestor, gives his son Antilochus such cunning directions,

that he comes in second, though his horses are confessedly the slowest

of the whole field. Next comes the battle with the cœstus--that

barbarous form of boxing-glove, which, far from deadening the force of

the blow delivered, made it more damaging and dangerous, inasmuch as the

padding consisted of thongs of raw ox-hide well hardened. The combat in

this case is very unequal, since the giant Epeius speedily fells his

younger and lighter antagonist, who is carried almost senseless from the

lists. The wrestlers are better matched; the skill and subtlety of

Ulysses are a counterpoise to the huge bulk and somewhat inactive

strength of Ajax, who lifts his opponent off his feet with ease, but is

brought to the ground himself by a dexterous kick upon the ancle-joint.

Another fall, in which neither has the advantage, leads to the dividing

of the prize--though how it was to be divided practically is not so

clear, since the first prize was a tripod valued at twelve oxen, and the

second a female captive, reckoned to be worth four.[21] The foot-race is

won by Ulysses, Minerva interfering for the second time to secure the

victory for her favourite, by tripping up the lesser Ajax (son of

Oileus), who was leading. The Greek poet does but refer what we should

call an unlucky accident to the agency of heaven. A single combat on

foot, with shield and spear, succeeds, the prize for which is the rich

armour of which Patroclus had spoiled Sarpedon. He who first draws blood

is to be the winner. Diomed and Ajax Telamon step into the lists, and

the combat between the two great champions grows so fierce and hot, that

the spectators insist on their being separated, and again the honours

are adjudged to be equal; although Diomed, who was clearly getting the

advantage, receives the chief portion of the divided prize. In the

quoit-throwing Ajax is beaten easily; and critics have remarked that in

no single contest does the poet allow him, though a favourite with the

army, to be successful. Those who insist upon the allegorical view of

the poem, tell us that the lesson is, that brute force is of little

avail without counsel. The archers’ prizes are next contended for, and

we have the original of the story which has been borrowed, with some

modifications, by many imitators from Virgil’s time downwards, and

figures in the history of the English ‘Clym of the Clough,’ and Tell of

Switzerland. Teucer, reputed the most skilful bowman in the whole host,

only shoots near enough to cut the cord which ties the dove to the mast,

while Meriones follows the bird with his aim as she soars far into the

air, and brings her down, pierced through and through, with his arrow.

But Meriones had vowed an offering to Apollo “of the silver bow,” which

Teucer, in the pride of his heart, had neglected. The games are closed

with hurling the spear, when the king Agamemnon himself, desirous to pay

all honour to his great rival’s grief, steps into the arena as a

competitor. With no less grace and dignity Achilles accepts the

compliment, but forbids the contest. “O son of Atreus, we know thou dost

far surpass us all”--and he hands the prize for his acceptance.

The anger against Agamemnon is past: but not so the savage wrath against

Hector. Combined with his passionate grief for Patroclus, it amounts to

madness. Morning after morning he rises from the restless couch where he

has lain thinking of his friend, and lashing the dead corpse afresh to

his chariot, drags it furiously thrice round the mound that covers

Patroclus’ ashes. Twelve days has the body now lain unburied; but Venus

and Apollo preserve it from decay. Venus sheds over it ambrosial roseate

unguents, and Apollo covers it with a dark cool cloud. In less

mythological language, the loathliness of death may not mar its beauty,

nor the sunbeams breed in it corruption. Even the Olympians are seized

with horror and pity. In spite of the remonstrances of his still

implacable queen, Jupiter instructs Thetis to visit her son. and soften

his cruel obduracy. At the same time he sends Iris to Priam, and

persuades him to implore Achilles in person to restore the body of his

son. Accompanied by a single herald, and bearing a rich ransom, the aged

king passes the Greek lines by night (for Mercury himself becomes his

guide, disguised in the form of a Greek straggler, and casts a deep

sleep upon the sentinels). He reaches the tent of Achilles, who has just

ended his evening meal, throws himself at his feet, and kisses “the

dreadful murderous hands by which so many of his sons have fallen,” in

an agony of supplication. He adjures the conqueror, by the thought of

his own aged father Peleus--now looking and longing for his return--to

have some pity on a bereaved old man, whose son can never return to him

alive; and at least to give him back the body.

“And for thy father’s sake look pitying down

On me, more needing pity: since I bear

Such grief as never man on earth hath borne,

Who stoop to kiss the hand that slew my son.”

With the impulsive suddenness which is a part of his character, Achilles

gives way at once--prepared, indeed, to yield, by his mother’s

remonstrances. He gives orders to have the body clothed in costly

raiment, and washed and anointed by the handmaidens; nay, even lifts his

dead enemy with his own hands, and lays him on a couch. Yet he will not

let Priam as yet look upon the corpse, lest at the sight of his grief

his own passion should break out afresh. The father spends the night in

the tent of his son’s slayer, and there he closes his eyes in sleep for

the first time since the day of Hector’s death. In the morning he

returns to Troy with his mournful burden, and the funeral rites of

Hector close the poem. The boon which Achilles has granted he makes

complete by the spontaneous offer of twelve days’ truce, that so Troy

may bury her dead hero with his rightful honours. The wailings of Priam

and Hecuba, though naturally expressed, are but commonplace compared

with the last tribute of the remorseful Helen:--

“Hector, of all my brethren dearest thou!

True, godlike Paris claims me as his wife,

Who bore me hither--would I then had died!

But twenty years have passed since here I came,

And left my native land; yet ne’er from thee

I heard one scornful, one degrading word;

And when from others I have borne reproach,

Thy brothers, sister, or thy brothers’ wives,

Or mother (for thy sire was ever kind

Even as a father), thou hast checked them still

With tender feeling and with gentle words.

For thee I weep, and for myself no less,

For through the breadth of Troy none love me now,

None kindly look on me, but all abhor.” (D.)

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUDING REMARKS.

The character of Hector has been very differently estimated. Modern

writers upon Homer generally assume that the ancient bard had, as it

were, a mental picture of all his great heroes before him, of their

inner as well as of their outer man, and worked from this in the various

acts and speeches which he has assigned to each. Probably nothing could

be further from the truth. If the poet could be questioned as to his

immortal work, and required to give a detailed character of each of his

chief personages, such as his modern admirers present us with, he would

most likely confess that such character as his heroes possess was built

up by degrees, as occasion called for them to act and speak, and that

his own portraits (where they were not derived from the current

traditions) rested but little upon any preconceived ideal. It is very

difficult to estimate character at all in a work of fiction in which the

principles of conduct are in many respects so different from those of

our own age. How far even the ablest critics have succeeded in the

attempt in the case of Hector may be judged from this; that whereas

Colonel Mure speaks of “a turn for vainglorious boasting” as his

characteristic defect,[22] Mr Froude remarks that “while Achilles is all

pride, Hector is all modesty.”[23] Both criticisms are from writers of

competent taste and judgment; but both cannot possibly be true. There

can be no doubt that Hector makes a considerable number of vaunting

speeches in the course of the poem--vaunts which he does not always

carry out; but in this respect he differs rather in degree than in

principle from most of the other warriors, Greek as well as Trojan; and

if the boasts of Achilles are always made good, while Hector’s often

come to nothing, that follows almost necessarily from the fact that

Achilles is the hero of the tale. A boastful tongue and a merciless

spirit are attributes of the heroic character in Homer: his heroes bear

a singular resemblance in these two points to the “braves” of the

American Indians; while they are utterly unlike them in their

sensitiveness to physical pain, their undisguised horror of death, and

their proneness to give loud expression to both feelings. Without

attempting to sketch a full-length portrait, which probably Homer

himself would not recognise, it may be said that Hector interests us

chiefly because he is far more human than Achilles, in his weakness as

well as in his strength; his honest love for his wife and child, his

pitying condonation of Helen, his half-contemptuous kindness to his weak

brother Paris, his hearty and unselfish devotion to his country.

Achilles is the “hero,” indeed, in the classical sense--_i.e._, he is

the demi-god, superior to many of the mortal weaknesses which are

palpable enough in the character of his antagonist: as little

susceptible to Hector’s alternations of confidence and panic, as to his

tender anxieties about his wife and child. The contrast between the two

is very remarkable; as strong, though of quite a different kind, as that

between the two chief female characters in the poem--Helen, charming

even in her frailty, attracting us and compelling our admiration in

spite of our moral judgment; Andromache, the blameless wife and mother,

whose charm is the beauty of true womanhood, and whose portrait, as

drawn by the poet, bears strong witness by its sweetness and purity to

the essential soundness of the domestic relations in the age which he

depicts.

The poem, as we have seen, ends somewhat abruptly. We learn nothing from

it of the fate of Troy, except so far as we have been taught throughout

the tale that the fortunes of the city and people depended wholly upon

Hector. “Achilles’ wrath” was the theme of the song, and now that this

has been appeased, we wait for no further catastrophe. Yet, if Achilles

has been the hero, it is remarkable that the poet’s parting sympathies

appear to rest, as those of the reader almost certainly will, with

Hector. It would seem that Homer himself felt something of what he makes

Jupiter express with regard to the Trojans--“They interest me, though

they must needs perish.” The Trojan hero must fall, or the glory of the

Greek could not be consummated; but the last words of the poem, as they

record his funeral honours, so they express the poet’s regretful

eulogy:--

“Such honours paid they to the good knight Hector.”

Virgil, in his Æneid, naturally exalts the glory of Hector, because it

was his purpose to trace the origin of the Romans from Troy; but we

need not wonder that in later days, when the Homeric legends were worked

up into tales of Christian chivalry, Hector, and not Achilles, became

the model of a Christian knight. When the great Italian poet drew his

character of Orlando, as a type of chivalry, he had the Trojan hero in

his mind.

One of the earliest and most curious travesties of the Iliad--for it is

hardly more, though made in all good faith, according to the taste of

the times--was the work of an English troubadour, Benedict de St Maur,

of the time of Henry II. It was reproduced, as a prose romance, in

Latin, by Guido de Colonna, a Sicilian; but is better known--so far as

it can be said to be known at all--as the ‘History of the Warres of the

Greeks and Trojans,’ by John Lydgate, monk of Bury St Edmunds, first

printed in 1513. The writer professedly takes Colonna as his original.

The heroes of the Iliad reappear as the knights of modern chivalry; they

fight on horseback, observe all the rules of medieval courtesy, and

“fewtre their speres” at each other exactly in the style of the

Companions of the Round Table. Agamemnon is very like Arthur, and

Achilles Sir Lancelot, under other names. But Hector is here also

plainly the favourite hero. Thersites figures as a dwarf, with all the

malice and mischief peculiar, and in some degree permitted, to those

imaginary types of humanity. The closing lines of Lydgate’s third book

will give some idea of the strange transformation which Homer’s story

undergoes in the hands of our medieval poet, and is a curious instance

of the way in which the zealous churchman “improves” his pagan subject.

He is describing the funeral rites of Hector:--

“And when Priam in full thrifty wyse

Performed hath as ye have heard devyse,

Ordained eke, as Guido[24] can you tell,

A certain nombre of priestes for to dwell

In the temple in their devotions,

Continually with devout orisons

For the soule of Hector for to pray.

* * * * *

To which priestes the kyng gave mansyons,

There to abide, and possessyons,

The which he hath to them mortysed

Perpetually, as ye have heard devysed,

And while they kneel, pray, and wake,

I caste fully me an end to make

Finally of this my thirde booke

On my rude manner as I undertooke.”

The way in which the Homeric characters are modernised in Chaucer and

Dryden, and even in Shakspeare’s ‘Troilus and Cressida,’ is a deviation

from their originals hardly more excusable, though less absurd, than

this of Lydgate’s. They copied, in fact, not from the original at all,

but from the medieval corruptions of it. Racine’s tragedies are in a

higher vein, and his Iphigenia, though not Homer’s story, does more

justice to some of Homer’s characters: but after all, as has been well

observed, “they are dressed in the Parisian fashions, with speech and

action accordingly.”[25]

The Iliad, as has been already remarked, closes more abruptly than its

modern title would seem to justify, for the Tale of Troy is left half

untold. Imitators of the great bard followed him, and though their works

are lost to us, the legends upon which they worked have been reproduced

by later writers. The poems once known as the ‘Little Iliad’ and the

‘Sacking of Troy’ have left little more than their names, and some few

fragments which, do not raise much regret for the loss of the

remainder; but the leading events of which they treated are preserved in

the works of the Greek dramatists and of Virgil. It may not be out of

place here to sketch briefly the sequel to Homer’s story.

Troy fell in that tenth year of the siege, though new and remarkable

allies came to the aid of Priam. From the far north of Thrace came a

band of Amazons--women-warriors who, in spite of their weaker sex,

proved more than a match in battle for the men of Greece. Their queen

Penthesilea was said to be the daughter of the War-god; and under her

leading, once more the Trojans tried their fortune in the open field,

not unsuccessfully, until she too fell by the spear of Achilles.

Proceeding to possess himself of her helmet, as the conqueror’s spoil,

he was struck with her remarkable beauty, and stood entranced for some

moments in sorrow and admiration. It is the scene from which Tasso

borrows his story of Clorinda, and which Spenser had in his mind when he

makes Sir Artegal, after having unhelmed the fair Britomart in combat,

let fall his sword at the sight of her “angel-face”--

“His powerless hand, benumbed with secret fear,

From his revengefull purpose shronke abacke,

And cruel sword out of his fingers slacke

Fell down to ground, as if the steel had sence

And felt some ruth, or sence his hand did lacke,

Or both of them did think obedience

To doe to so divine a Beautie’s excellence.”

--B. IV. c. vi. st. 21.

Thersites--who had by this time forgotten the chastisement inflicted on

him by Ulysses for his scurrilous tongue--ventured a jest upon Achilles’

sensibility, and was struck dead by a blow from the hero’s unarmed

hand. Next came upon the scene the tall Ethiopian Memnon, son of the

Dawn, a warrior of more than mortal beauty, sent either from Egypt or

from the king of Assyria (for the legends vary), with a contingent of

fierce negro warriors, who carried slaughter into the Greek ranks, until

Memnon too fell by the hand of the same irresistible antagonist. These

were only brief respites for the doomed city. But it was not to fall by

the hand of Achilles. Before its day of destruction came, the Greek hero

had met with the fate which he himself foresaw--which had been

prophesied for him alike by his mother the sea-goddess, by the wondrous

utterance of his horse Xanthus, and by the dying words of Hector. An

arrow from Paris found the single vulnerable spot in his right heel, and

stretched him where he had slain his Trojan enemy--before the Scæan

gate. But his death, according to the legends, was no more like that of

common mortals than his life had been. He does not go down into those

gloomy regions where the ghosts of his friend Patroclus and his enemy

Hector wander. It was not death, but a translation. The Greeks had

prepared for him a magnificent funeral pile, but the body of the hero

suddenly disappeared. His mother Thetis conveyed it away to the island

of Leukè in the Euxine Sea, to enjoy in that seclusion a new and

perpetual life. So early is the legend which the romance of Christendom

adopted for so many of its favourites--notably for the English Arthur,

borne by the three mysterious queens to

“The island valley of Avilion,”

where, it was long said and believed, he lay either in a charmed sleep

or a passionless immortality. One legend ran that the Greek hero, in his

happy island, was favoured with the society of Helen, whose matchless

beauty he had much desired to see.

His wondrous shield and armour--the masterpieces of Vulcan--were left by

Thetis as a prize for “the bravest of the Greeks,” and became almost as

fatal a source of discord as the golden apple which had been labelled

for “the fairest.” Ulysses and Ajax were the most distinguished

claimants, and when, as before, counsel was preferred to strength, Ajax

went mad with vexation, and fell upon his own sword. Ulysses handed on

the coveted armour to its rightful inheritor, the young Neoptolemus, son

of Achilles, who, in accordance with an oracle, had been sent for to

take Troy. Still the city held out, secure so long as the sacred image

of Minerva, the “Palladium,” a gift from Jupiter himself, remained in

the citadel: until Ulysses broke the spell by entering within the walls

in disguise, and carrying it off. One quick eye discovered the venturous

Greek, through his rags and self-inflicted wounds: Helen recognised him;

but she was weary of her guilty life, and became an excusable traitress

in favour of her lawful husband. It was again the fertile brain of

Ulysses which conceived the stratagem of the wooden horse; and when the

curiosity of the Trojans (against all ordinary probabilities, it must be

confessed) dragged it inside the walls, the armed warriors whom it

contained issued forth in the night, and opened the gates to their

comrades.

The details of the sack of the city are neither more nor less horrible

than similar scenes which are unhappily too historical. Priam is slain

at the altar of his house; his family either share his fate, or are

carried into captivity. Of the contradictory legends as to the fate of

“Hector’s Andromache”--as in Virgil’s great poem she pathetically calls

herself--the reader will gladly choose, with that poet, the least

painful version, which leaves her settled at Buthrotus in Epirus, in a

peaceful retirement full of gentle regrets, as the wife of Hector’s

brother Helenus.

Of Helen and Menelaus we shall hear more in Homer’s tale of the

Wanderings of Ulysses. He says nothing of the scene which the later

dramatists give us, by no means inconsistent with his own portrait of

the pair, when at the taking of the city the outraged husband rushes

upon the adulteress with uplifted sword, and drops his weapon at the

sight of her well-remembered and matchless beauty. For the miserable

sequel of Agamemnon’s story we may refer also to the Odyssey. Few of the

Greek heroes returned home in peace. They had insulted the gods of Troy,

and they were cursed with toilsome wanderings and long banishment like

Ulysses, or met with a worse fate still. Diomed did not indeed leave his

wife Ægiale a heart-broken widow, as Dione in her anger had predicted,

but found on his return that she had consoled herself with another lover

in his absence, and narrowly escaped assassination by her hand. Teucer

was refused a home by his father, because he did not bring his brother

Ajax back with him to the old man. The lesser Ajax was wrecked and

drowned on his homeward voyage. Fate spared Nestor, old as he was, to

return to his stronghold at Pylos; but his son Antilochus had fallen in

the flower of his age on the plains of Troy. The names of many of the

wanderers were preserved in the colonies which they founded along the

coasts of Greece and Italy, and the heroes of the great Siege of Troy

spread its fame over all the then known world.

END OF THE ILIAD.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

* * * * *

HOMER

THE ODYSSEY

BY THE

REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.

AUTHOR OF

‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC.

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MDCCCLXX

CONTENTS.

PAGE

INTRODUCTION, 1

CHAP. I. PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS, 9

“ II. TELEMACHUS GOES IN QUEST OF HIS FATHER, 26

“ III. ULYSSES WITH CALYPSO AND THE PHÆACIANS, 43

“ IV. ULYSSES TELLS HIS STORY TO ALCINOUS, 65

“ V. THE TALE CONTINUED--THE VISIT TO THE SHADES, 78

“ VI. ULYSSES’ RETURN TO ITHACA, 89

“ VII. THE RETURN OF TELEMACHUS FROM SPARTA, 95

“ VIII. ULYSSES REVISITS HIS PALACE, 100

“ IX. THE DAY OF RETRIBUTION, 109

“ X. THE RECOGNITION BY PENELOPE, 116

“ XI. CONCLUDING REMARKS, 125

It has been thought desirable in these pages to use the Latin names of

the Homeric deities and heroes, as more familiar to English ears. As,

however, most modern translators have followed Homer’s Greek

nomenclature, it may be convenient here to give both.

Zeus = Jupiter.

Herè = Juno.

Arēs = Mars.

Poseidōn = Neptune.

Pallas Athenè = Minerva.

Aphroditè = Venus.

Hephaistos = Vulcan.

Hermes = Mercury.

Artemis = Diana.

* * * * *

Odysseus = Ulysses.

Aias = Ajax.

The passages quoted, unless otherwise specified, are from the admirable

translation of Mr Worsley.

INTRODUCTION.

The poem of the Odyssey is treated in these pages as the work of a

single author, and that author the same as the composer of the Iliad. It

would be manifestly out of place, in a volume which does not profess to

be written for critical scholars, to discuss a question on which they

are so far from being agreed. But it may be satisfactory to assure the

reader who has neither leisure nor inclination to enter into the

controversy, that in accepting, as we do, the Odyssey as from the same

“Homer” to whom we owe the Tale of Troy, he may fortify himself by the

authority of many accomplished scholars who have carefully examined the

question. Though none of the incidents related in the Iliad are

distinctly referred to in the Odyssey--a point strongly urged by those

who would assign the poems to different authors--and therefore the one

cannot fairly be regarded as a sequel to the other, yet there is no

important discrepancy, either in the facts previously assumed, or in the

treatment of such characters as appear upon the scene in both.

The character of the two poems is, indeed, essentially different. The

Iliad is a tale of the camp and the battle-field: the Odyssey combines

the romance of travel with that of domestic life. The key-note of the

Iliad is glory: that of the Odyssey is rest. This was amongst the

reasons which led one of the earliest of Homer’s critics to the

conclusion that the Odyssey was the work of his old age. In both poems

the interest lies in the situations and the descriptions, rather than in

what we moderns call the “plot.” This latter is not a main consideration

with the poet, and he has no hesitation in disclosing his catastrophe

beforehand. The interest, so far as this point is concerned, is also

weakened for the modern reader by the intervention throughout of

supernatural agents, who, at the most critical turns of the story, throw

their irresistible weight into the scale. Yet, in spite of this, the

interest of the Odyssey is intensely human. Greek mythology and Oriental

romance are large ingredients in the poem, but its men and women are

drawn by a master’s hand from the actual life; and, since in the two

thousand years between our own and Homer’s day nothing has changed so

little as human nature, therefore very much of it is still a story of

to-day.

The poem before us is the tale of the wanderings and adventures of

Odysseus--or Ulysses, as the softer tongue of the Latins preferred to

call him--on his way home from the siege of Troy to his island-kingdom

of Ithaca. The name Odysseus has been variously interpreted. Homer

himself, who should be the best authority, tells us that it was given to

him by his grandfather Autolycus to signify “the child of hate.” Others

have interpreted it to mean “suffering;” and some ingenious scholars see

in it only the ancient form of a familiar sobriquet by which the hero

was known, “the little one,” or “the dwarf,”--a conjecture which derives

some support from the fact that the Tyrrhenians knew him under that

designation. It may be remembered that in the Iliad he is described as

bearing no comparison in stature with the stalwart forms of Agamemnon

and Menelaus; and it is implied in the description that there was some

want of proportion in his figure, since he appeared nobler than Menelaus

when both sat down. But in the Odyssey itself there appears no reference

to any natural defect of any kind. His character in this poem

corresponds perfectly with that which is disclosed in the Iliad. There,

he is the leading spirit of the Greeks when in council. Scarcely second

to Achilles or Diomed in personal prowess, his advice and opinion are

listened to with as much respect as those of the veteran Nestor. In the

Iliad, too, he is, as he is called in the present poem, “the man of many

devices.” His accomplishments cover a larger field than those of any

other hero. Achilles only can beat him in speed of foot; he is as good

an archer as Ajax Oileus or Teucer; he throws Ajax the Great in the

wrestling-match, in spite of his superior strength, by a happy use of

science, and divides with him the prize of victory. To him, as the

worthiest successor of Achilles--on the testimony of the Trojan

prisoners, who declared that he had wrought them most harm of any--the

armour of that great hero was awarded at his death. He is not tragic

enough to fill the first place in the Iliad, but we are quite prepared

to find him the hero of a story of travel and adventure like the

Odyssey, in which the grand figure of Achilles would be entirely out of

place.

The Odyssey has been pronounced, by a high classical authority, to be

emphatically a lady’s book. “The Iliad,” says the great Bentley, “Homer

made for men, and the Odyssey for the other sex.” This opinion somewhat

contradicts the criticism of an older and greater master--Aristotle--who

defines the Odyssey as being “ethic and complex,” while the Iliad is

“pathetic and simple.” Yet it was perhaps some such notion of the

fitness of things which made Fénélon’s adaptation of Homer’s story, ‘The

Adventures of Telemachus in search of Ulysses,’ so popular a French

text-book in ladies’ schools a century ago. It is certain, also, that

the allusions in our modern literature, and the subjects of modern

pictures, are drawn from the Odyssey even more frequently than from the

Iliad, although the former has never been so generally read in our

schools and colleges. Circe and the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, have

pointed more morals than any incidents in the Siege of Troy. Turner’s

pictures of Nausicaa and her Maidens, the Gardens of Alcinous, the

Cyclops addressed by Ulysses, the Song of the Sirens--all amongst our

national heirlooms of art--assume a fair acquaintance with the later

Homeric fable on the part of the public for whom they were painted. The

secret of this greater popularity may lie in the fact, that while the

adventures in the Odyssey have more of the romantic and the imaginative,

the heroes are less heroic--have more of the common human type about

them--than those of the Iliad. The colossal figure of Achilles in his

wrath does not affect us so nearly as the wandering voyager with his

strange adventures, his hairbreadth escapes, and his not over-scrupulous

devices.

To our English sympathies the Odyssey appeals strongly for another

reason--it is a tale of voyage and discovery. “It is,” as Dean Alford

says, “of all poems a poem of the sea.” In the Iliad the poet never

missed an opportunity of letting us know that--whoever he was and

wherever he was born--he knew the sea well, and had a seaman’s tastes.

But there his tale confined him chiefly to the plain before Troy, and

such opportunities presented themselves but rarely. In the Odyssey we

roam from sea to sea throughout the narrative, and the restless hero

seems never so much at home as when he is on shipboard. It is not

without reason that the most ancient works of art which bear the figure

of Ulysses represent him not as a warrior but as a sailor.

The Tale of Troy, as has been already said, embraces in its whole range

three decades of years. It is with the last ten that the Odyssey has to

do; and as in the Iliad, though the siege itself had consumed ten years,

it is with the last year only that the poet deals; so in this second

great poem also, the main action occupies no more than the last six

weeks of the third and concluding decade.

Between the Iliad and the Odyssey there is an interval of events, not

related in either poem, but which a Greek audience of the poet’s own day

would readily supply for themselves out of a store of current legend

quite familiar to their minds, and embodied in more than one ancient

poem now lost to us.[26] Troy, after the long siege, had fallen at last;

but not to Achilles. For him the dying prophecy of Hector had been soon

fulfilled, and an arrow from the bow of Paris had stretched him in

death, like his noble enemy, “before the Scæan gates.” It was his son

Neoptolemus, “the red-haired,” to whom the oracles pointed as the

destined captor of the city. Ulysses went back to Greece to fetch him,

and even handed over to the young hero, on his arrival, the armour of

his father--his own much-valued prize. In that armour Neoptolemus led

the Greeks to the storm and sack of the city by night, while the Trojans

were either asleep or holding deep carousal.

It has been conjectured by some that, under the name of Ulysses, the

poet has but described, with more or less of that licence to which he

had a double claim as poet and as traveller, his own wanderings and

adventures by land and sea. It has been argued, in a treatise of some

ingenuity,[27] that the poet, whoever he was, was himself a native of

the island in which he places the home of his hero. There is certainly

one passage which reads very much like the circumstantial and loving

description which a poet would give of his sea-girt birthplace, with

every nook of which he would have been familiar from his childhood. It

occurs in the scene where Ulysses is at last landed on the coast of

Ithaca, which he is slow to recognise until his divine guide points out

to him the different localities within sight:--

“This is the port of sea-king Phorcys old,

And this the olive at the haven’s brow.

Yonder the deep dark lovely cave behold,

Shrine of the Naïad-nymphs! These shades enfold

The stone-roofed bower, wherein thou oft hast stood,

While to the Nymphs thy frequent vows uprolled,

Steam of choice hecatombs and offerings good.

Neritus hill stands there, high-crowned with waving wood.”[28]

As conjecture only all such theories must remain; but it may at least be

safely believed that the author had himself visited some of the strange

lands which he describes, with whatever amount of fabulous ornament he

may have enriched his tale, and it has a certain interest for the reader

to entertain the possibility of a personal narrative thus underlying the

romance.

THE ODYSSEY.

CHAPTER I.

PENELOPE AND HER SUITORS.

The surviving heroes of the great expedition against Troy, after long

wanderings, have at length reached their homes, with one

exception--Ulysses has not been heard of in his island-kingdom of

Ithaca. Ten years have nearly passed since the fall of Troy, and still

his wife Penelope, and his aged father Laertes, and his young son

Telemachus, now growing up to manhood, keep weary watch for the hero’s

return. There is, moreover, a twofold trouble in the house. It is not

only anxiety for an absent husband, but the perplexity caused by a crowd

of importunate suitors for her hand, which vexes the soul of Penelope

from day to day. The young nobles of Ithaca and its dependent islands

have for many years flocked to the palace to seek the hand of her whom

they consider as virtually a widowed queen. It is to no purpose that

she professes her own firm belief that Ulysses still survives: she has

no kind of proof of his existence, and the suitors demand of her

that--in accordance with what would appear the custom of the

country--she shall make choice of some one among them to take the lost

hero’s place, and enjoy all the rights of sovereignty. How far the

lovers were attracted by the wealth and position of the lady, and how

far by the force of her personal charms, is a point somewhat hard to

decide. The Roman poet Horace imputes to them the less romantic motive.

They were, he says, of that class of prudent wooers--

“Who prized good living more than ladies’ love;”

and he even hints that Penelope’s knowledge of their real sentiments

helped to account for her obduracy. But Horace, we must remember, was a

satirist by trade. A mere prosaic reader might be tempted to raise the

question whether the personal charms of Penelope, irresistible as they

might have been when Ulysses first left her for the war, must not have

been somewhat impaired during the twenty years of his absence; and

whether it was possible for a widow of that date (especially with a

grown-up son continually present as a memento) to inspire such very

ardent admiration. These arithmetical critics have always been the pests

of poetry. One very painstaking antiquarian--Jacob Bryant--in the course

of his studies on the Iliad, made the discovery, by a comparison of

mythological dates, that Helen herself must have been nearly a hundred

years old at the taking of Troy. But the question of age has been

unanimously voted impertinent by all her modern admirers: she still

shines in our fancy with

“The starlike beauty of immortal eyes”

which the Laureate saw in his ‘Dream of Fair Women.’ The heroic legends

take no count of years. Woman is there beautiful by divine right of sex,

unless in those few special instances in which, for the purposes of the

story, particular persons are necessarily represented as old and

decrepit. Nor is there any ground for supposing that the suitors of

Penelope, like the courtiers of Queen Elizabeth, persisted in

attributing to her fictitious charms. She is evidently not less

beautiful in the poet’s eyes than in theirs. As beauty has been happily

said to be, after all, “the lover’s gift,” so also the bestowal of it

upon whom he will must be allowed to be the privilege of the poet. The

island-queen herself says, indeed, that her beauty had fled when Ulysses

left her, and could only be restored by his return; but this disclaimer

from the lips of a loving and mourning wife only makes her more

charming, and she is not the only woman, ancient or modern, who has

borrowed an additional fascination from her tears.

The suitors of Penelope, strange to say, are living at free quarters in

the palace of the absent Ulysses. Telemachus is too young, apparently,

to assert his rights as master of the house on his own or his mother’s

behalf. If the picture be true to the life--and there is no good reason

to suppose it otherwise--we must assume an age of rude licence even in

the midst of considerable civilisation, when, unless a king or chief

could hold his own by the strong hand, there was small chance of his

rights being respected. A partial explanation may also lie in the fact

that the wealth of the king was regarded as in some sort public

property, and that to keep open house for all whose rank entitled them

to sit at his table was probably a popular branch of the royal

prerogative. Telemachus is an only son, and he and his mother have

apparently no near kinsmen to avenge any wrong or insult that may be

offered. There is, besides, somewhat of weakness and tameness in his

character, more than befits the son of such a father. He is a

home-nurtured youth, of a gentle and kindly nature, a dutiful and

affectionate son; but his temperament is far too easy for the rude and

troublous times in which his lot is cast, and the roystering crew who

profess at least to be the wooers of Penelope have not been slow to find

it out. Some kindly critics (“Christopher North” among the number) have

refused to see any of these shortcomings in the young prince’s

character; but his father Ulysses saw them plainly. For thus it is he

speaks, at a later period of the tale, under his disguise of a

mendicant:--

“Had I but youth as I have heart, or were

The blameless brave Ulysses, or his son,

Then let a stranger strike me headless there,

If against any I leave revenge undone!”

But this is anticipating somewhat too much. We must return to the

opening of the poem.

The fate of Ulysses, so far as any knowledge of it has reached his wife

and son, lies yet in mystery. Only the gods know--and perhaps it were as

well for Penelope not to know--in what unworthy thraldom he is held. He

has incurred the anger of the great Sea-god, and therefore he is still

forbidden to reach his home. He has lain captive now for seven long

years in Ogygia, the enchanted realm of Calypso--

“Girded of ocean in an island-keep,

An island clothed with trees, the navel of the deep.

“There dwells the child of Atlas, who can sound

All seas, and eke doth hold the pillars tall

Which keep the skies asunder from the ground.

There him, still sorrowing, she doth aye enthral,

Weaving serene enticements to forestal

The memory of his island-realm.”

But the goddess of wisdom, who was his protecting genius throughout the

perils of the great siege, and by whose aid, as we have seen in the

Iliad, he has distanced so many formidable competitors in the race for

glory, has not forgotten her favourite. The opening scene of the Odyssey

shows us the gods in council on Olympus. Neptune alone is absent; he is

gone to feast, like Jupiter in the Iliad, with those mysterious people,

the far-off Æthiopians--

“Extreme of men, who diverse ways retire,

Some to the setting, some the rising sun.”

Minerva takes the opportunity of his absence to remind the Father of the

gods of the hard fate of Ulysses, so unworthy of a hero who has deserved

so well both of gods and men. It is agreed to send Mercury, the

messenger of the Immortals, to the island where Calypso holds Ulysses

captive in her toils, to announce to him that the day of his return

draws near. Minerva herself, meanwhile, will go to Ithaca, and put

strength into the heart of his son Telemachus, that he may rid his house

of this hateful brood of revellers, and set forth to make search for his

father. The passage in which the poet describes her visit is a fine one,

and it has been finely rendered by Mr Worsley:--

“So ending, underneath her feet she bound

Her faery sandals of ambrosial gold,

Which o’er the waters and the solid ground

Swifter than wind have borne her from of old;

Then on the iron-pointed spear laid hold,

Heavy and tall, wherewith she smites the brood

Of heroes till her anger waxes cold;

Then from Olympus swept in eager mood,

And with the island-people in the court she stood

“Fast by the threshold of the outer gate

Of brave Odysseus: in her hand she bore

The iron-pointed spear, heavy and great,

And, waiting as a guest-friend at the door,

Of Mentes, Taphian chief, the likeness wore;

There found the suitors, who beguiled with play

The hours, and sat the palace-gates before

On hides of oxen which themselves did slay--

Haughty of mien they sat, and girt with proud array.”

As the young prince sits thus, an unwilling host in his father’s hall,

meditating, says the poet, whether or no some day that father may return

suddenly and take vengeance on these invaders of his rights, against

whom he himself seems powerless, he lifts his eyes and sees a stranger

standing at the gate. With simple and high-bred courtesy--the courtesy

of the old Bible patriarchs, and even now practised by the Orientals,

though the march of modern civilisation has left little remnant of it in

our western isles--he hastes to bid the stranger welcome, on the simple

ground that he is a stranger, and will hear no word of his errand until

the rights of hospitality have been paid. Eager as he is to hear

possible news of his father, he restrains his anxiety to question his

guest. Not until the handmaidens have brought water in the silver ewers,

and the herald, and the carver, and the dame of the pantry (it is a

right royal establishment, if somewhat rude) have each done their office

to supply the stranger’s wants, does Telemachus ask him a single

question. But when the suitors have ended their feast, they call for

music and song. They compel Phemius, the household bard, to make mirth

for them. Then, while he plies his voice and lyre for their

entertainment, the son of Ulysses whispers aside with his visitor. Who

is he, and whence does he come? Is he a friend of his father’s? For many

a guest, and none unwelcome, had come to those halls, as the son well

knows, in _his_ day. Above all, does he bring news of _him_? Then the

disguised goddess tells her story, with a circumstantial minuteness of

invention which befits wisdom when she condescends to falsehood:--

“Know, my name is hight

Mentes, the son of brave Anchialus,

And sea-famed Taphos is my regal right;

And with my comrades am I come to-night

Hither, in sailing o’er the wine-dark sea

To men far off, who stranger tongues indite.

For copper am I bound to Temesè,

And in my bark I bring sword-steel along with me.

“Moored is my ship beyond the city walls,

Under the wooded cape, within the bay.

We twain do boast, each in the other’s halls,

Our fathers’ friendship from an ancient day.

Hero Laertes ask, and he will say.”

But of Ulysses’ present fate the guest declares he knows nothing; only

he has a presentiment that he is detained somewhere in an unwilling

captivity, but that, “though he be bound with chains of iron,” he will

surely find his way home again. But in any case, as his father’s friend,

the supposed Mentes bids Telemachus take heart and courage, and act

manfully for himself. Let him give this train of riotous suitors fair

warning to quit the palace, and waste his substance no more; let his

mother Penelope go back to her own father’s house (if she desires to wed

again), and make her choice and hold her wedding-banquet there; and for

his own part, let him at once set sail and make inquiry for his father

round the coasts of Greece. It may be that Nestor of Pylos, or Menelaus

of Sparta--the last returned of the chiefs of the expedition--can give

him some tidings. If he can only hear that Ulysses is yet alive, then he

may well endure to wait his return with patience; if assured of his

death, it will befit him to take due vengeance on these his enemies. The

divine visitor even hints a reproach of Telemachus’ present

inactivity:--

“No more, with thews like these, to weakness cling.

Hast thou not heard divine Orestes’ fame,

Who slew the secret slayer of the king

His father, and achieved a noble name?

Thou also, friend, to thine own strength lay claim--

Comely thou art and tall--that men may speak

Thy prowess, and their children speak the same.”

The young prince duteously accepts the counsel, as from his father’s

friend, and prays his guest to tarry a while. But Minerva, her mission

accomplished, suddenly changes her shape, spreads wings, and vanishes.

Then Telemachus recognises the goddess, and feels a new life and

spirit born within him. If we choose to admit an allegorical

interpretation--more than commonly tempting, as must be confessed, in

this particular case--it is the advent of Wisdom and Discretion to the

conscious heart of the youth, hitherto too little awakened to its

responsibilities.

Telemachus returns to his place among the revellers a new man. They are

still listening to the minstrel, Phemius, who chants a lay of the return

of the Greek chiefs from Troy, and the sufferings inflicted on them

during their homeward voyage by the vengeance of the gods. The sound

reaches Penelope where she sits apart with her wise maidens, like the

mother of Sisera, in her “upper chamber”--the “bower” of the ladies of

mediæval chivalry. She comes down the stair, and stands on the threshold

of the banqueting-hall, attracted by the song. But the subject is too

painful. She calls the bard to her, and begs him, for her sake, to

choose some other theme. We must not be too angry with Telemachus

because, in the first flush of his newly-awakened sense of the

responsibilities of his position, he uses language, in addressing his

mother, which to our ears has a sound of harshness and reproach. He bids

her not presume to set limits to the inspiration of the bard--the

noblest theme is ever the best. He reminds her that woman’s kingdom is

the loom and the distaff, and that the rule over men in his father’s

house now belongs to him. Viewed with reference to the tone of the age

as regarded the duties of women,--compared with the parting charge of

Hector in the Iliad to the wife he loved so tenderly, and even with a

higher example in Scripture,--there is nothing startling or repulsive in

such language from a son to his mother. To the young prince in his new

mood, while the counsels of Minerva were yet ringing in his ears, the

absence and the sufferings of his father might well seem the only theme

on which he could endure to hear the minstrel descant; it was of this,

he feels, that he needed to be continually reminded. And if hitherto he

has allowed this riotous company to assume that, in the absence of

Ulysses, the government of his house has rested in the weak hands of a

woman, it shall be so no longer. He will take his father’s place.

The mother sees the change in her son’s temper with some surprise--we

may suppose, with somewhat mingled feelings of approval and

mortification. The boy has grown into a man on the sudden. The poet

gives us but a single word as any clue to the effect upon Penelope of

this evidently unaccustomed outburst of self-assertion on the part of

Telemachus. “Astonished,” he says, she withdraws at once to her upper

chamber, and there weeps her sorrows to sleep. Telemachus himself

addresses the assembled company in a tone which is evidently as new to

their ears as to those of his mother. He bids them, with a haughty

courtesy, feast their fill to-night; to-morrow he will summon (as is the

custom of the Homeric princes) a council of the heads of the people, and

there he will give them all public warning to quit his father’s house,

and feast--if they needs must feast--in each other’s houses, at their

own cost. If they refuse, and still make this riot of an absent man’s

wealth, he appeals from men to “the gods who live for ever” for a sure

and speedy vengeance.

The careless revellers mark the change in the young man as instantly as

Penelope. For a few moments they bite their lips in silence--“wondering

that he spake so bold.” The first to answer him is Antinous, the most

prominent ringleader of the confraternity of suitors. His character is

very like that of the worst stamp of the “Cavalier” of the days of our

own Charles II. Brave, bold, and insolent, there is yet a reckless

gaiety and a ready wit about him which would have made him at once a

favourite in that unprincipled court. He adds to these characteristics a

quality of which he might, unhappily, have also found a high example

there--that of ingratitude. He is bound by strong ties of obligation to

the house of Ulysses; his father had come in former days to seek an

asylum with the Chief of Ithaca from the vengeance of the Thesprotians,

and had been kindly entertained by him until his death. The son now

answers Telemachus with a taunting compliment upon the new character in

which he has just come out. “He means to claim for himself the

sovereignty of the island, as his father’s heir, no doubt; but the gods

forbid that Ithaca should ever come under the rule of so fierce a

despot!” Telemachus makes answer that he will at all events rule his

father’s house. Upon this, Eurynomus, another leading spirit among the

rivals--a smoother-tongued and more cautious individual--soothes the

angry youth with what seems a plausible recognition of his rights, in

order that he may get an answer to a question on which he feels an

interest not unmixed, as we may easily understand, with some secret

apprehension. “Who was this traveller from over sea? and--did he happen

to bring any news of Ulysses?” But Telemachus has learnt subtlety as

well as wisdom from the disguised goddess. He gives the name assumed by

his visitor, Mentes, an old friend of the house. But as to his father’s

return, the oracles of the gods and the reports of men all agree in

pronouncing it to have now become hopeless. So the revel is renewed till

nightfall; and while the feasters go off to their own quarters somewhere

near at hand, Telemachus retires to his chamber (separate, apparently,

from the main building), where his old nurse Eurycleia tends him with a

careful affection, as though he were still a child, folding and hanging

up the vest of fine linen which he takes off when he lies down to sleep,

and drawing the bolt of the chamber door through its silver ring when

she leaves him.

The council of notables is summoned for the morrow. No such meeting has

been held since the departure of Ulysses for Troy. As Telemachus passes

to take his place there, all men remark a new majesty in his looks.

“So when the concourse to the full was grown,

He lifted in his hand the steely spear,

And to the council moved, but not alone,

For as he walked his swift dogs followed near.

Also Minerva did with grace endear

His form, that all the people gazed intent

And wondered, while he passed without a peer.

Straight to his father’s seat his course he bent,

And the old men gave way in reverence as he went.”

He makes his passionate protest before them all against the insufferable

waste of his household by this crew of revellers, and against their own

supineness in offering him no aid to dislodge them. Antinous rises to

answer him, beginning, as before, with an ironical compliment--“the

young orator’s language is as sublime as his spirit.” But the fault, he

begs to assure him, lies not with the suitors, but with the queen

herself. She has been playing fast and loose with her lovers, deluding

them, for these three years past, with vain hopes and false promises.

She had, indeed, been practising a kind of pious fraud upon them. She

had set up a mighty loom, in which she wrought diligently to complete,

as she professed, a winding-sheet of delicate texture for her husband’s

father, the aged Laertes, against the day of his death. Not until this

sad task was finished, she entreated of them, let her be asked to choose

a new bridegroom. To so much forbearance they had all assented; but lo!

they had lately discovered that what she wrought by day she carefully

unwound by night, so that the task promised to be an endless one. Some

of the handmaidens (who had found their own lovers, too, amongst their

royal mistress’s many suitors) had betrayed her secret. Antinous is

gallant enough to add to this recital of Penelope’s craft warm praises

of the queen herself, even giving her full credit for the bright woman’s

wit which had so long baffled them all.

“Matchless skill

To weave the splendid web; sagacious thought,

And shrewdness such as never fame ascribed

To any beauteous Greek of ancient days,

Tyro, Mycene, or Alcmene, loved

Of Jove himself, all whom th’ accomplished queen

Transcends in knowledge--ignorant alone

That, wooed long time, she should at last be won.”--(Cowper.)

But they will now be put off no longer--she must make her choice, or

they will never leave the house so long as she remains there unespoused.

Telemachus indignantly refuses to send his mother home to her father;

and repeats his passionate appeal to the gods for vengeance against the

wrongs which he is himself helpless to deal with. At once an omen from

heaven seems to betoken that the appeal is heard and accepted. Two

eagles are seen flying over the heads of the crowd assembled in the

marketplace, where they suddenly wheel round, and tear each other

furiously with beak and talons. The soothsayer is at hand to interpret;

the aged Halitherses, who reminds them all how he had foretold, when

Ulysses first left his own shores for Troy, the twenty years that would

elapse before his return. Now, he sees by this portent, the happy day

is near at hand; nay, in his zeal for his master’s house he goes so far

as to urge the assembled people to take upon themselves at once the

punishment of these traitors. One of the suitors mocks at the old man’s

auguries, and threatens him for his interference. The prophet is

silenced; and Telemachus, finding no support from the assembly, asks but

for a ship and crew to be furnished him, that he may set forth in search

of his father. One indignant voice, among the apathetic crowd, is raised

in the young prince’s defence: it is that of Mentor, to whom Ulysses had

intrusted the guardianship of his rights in his absence. His name has

passed into a synonym for all prudent guardians and moral counsellors,

chiefly in consequence of Fénélon’s didactic tale of ‘Télémaque,’

already mentioned, in which the adventures of the son of Ulysses were

“improved,” with elaborate morals, for the benefit of youth; and in

which Mentor, as the young prince’s travelling tutor, played a

conspicuous part. He vents his indignation here in a very striking

protest against popular ingratitude:--

“Hear me, ye Ithacans;--be never king

From this time forth benevolent, humane,

Or righteous; but let every sceptred hand

Rule merciless, and deal in wrong alone;

Since none of all his people, whom he swayed

With such paternal gentleness and love,

Remembers the divine Ulysses more.”--(Cowper.)

He, too, meets with jeers and mockery from the insolent nobles, and

Telemachus quits the assembly to wander in melancholy mood along the

sea-shore--the usual resort, it will be remarked, of the Homeric

heroes, when they seek to calm the tumult of grief or anger. Such appeal

to the soothing influence of what Homer calls the “illimitable” ocean is

not less true to nature than it is characteristic of the poetical and

imaginative temperament. Bathing his hands in the sea waves--for prayer,

to the Greek as to the Hebrew mind, demanded a preparatory

purification--Telemachus lifts his cry to his guardian goddess, Minerva.

At once she stands before him there in the likeness of Mentor. She

speaks to him words of encouragement and counsel. Evil men may mock at

him now; but if he be determined to prove himself the true son of such a

father, he shall not lack honour in the end. She will provide him ship

and crew for his voyage. Thus encouraged by the divine Wisdom which

speaks in the person of Mentor, he returns to the banquet-hall, to avoid

suspicion. Yet, when Antinous greets him there with a mocking show of

friendship, he wrenches his hand roughly from his grasp, and quits the

company. Taking into his counsels his nurse Eurycleia--who is the palace

housekeeper also--he bids her make ready good store of provisions for

his voyage: twelve capacious vessels filled with the ripest wine, twenty

measures of fine meal, and grain besides, carefully sewn up in wallets.

In the dusk of this very evening, unknown to his mother, he will embark;

for the goddess (still in Mentor’s likeness) has chartered for him a

galley with twenty stout rowers, which is to lie ready launched for him

in the harbour at nightfall. Eurycleia vainly remonstrates with her

nursling on his dangerous purpose--

“‘Ah! bide with thine own people here at ease.

There is no call to suffer useless pain,

Wandering always on the barren seas.’

But he: ‘Good nurse, prithee take heart again,

These things are not without a god nor vain.

Swear only that my mother shall not know

Till twelve days pass, or she herself be fain

To ask thee, or some other the tidings show,

Lest her salt tears despoil much loveliness with woe.’”

Telemachus’s resolve is fixed. As soon as the shadows of evening fall,

Minerva sends a strange drowsiness on the assembled revellers in the

hall of Ulysses, so that the wine-cups drop from their hands, and they

stagger off early to their couches. Then, in the person of Mentor, she

summons Telemachus to where the galley lies waiting for him, guides him

on board, and takes her place beside him in the stern.

“Loud and clear

Sang the bluff Zephyr o’er the wine-dark mere

Behind them. By Athene’s hest he blew.

Telemachus his comrades on did cheer

To set the tackling. With good hearts the crew

Heard him, and all things ranged in goodly order true.

“The olive mast, planted with care, they bind

With ropes, the white sails stretch on twisted hide,

And brace the mainsail to the bellying wind.

Loudly the keel rushed through the seething tide.

Soon as the good ship’s gear was all applied,

They ranged forth bowls crowned with dark wine, and poured

To gods who everlastingly abide,

Most to the stern-eyed child of heaven’s great lord.

All night the ship clave onward till the Dawn upsoared.”