BOOK II. Thetis and always conquerors whenever Meleagros is among them. But the Kourêtes are, like the Korybantes and the Idaian Daktyloi, the mystic dancers who can change their forms at will, and thus their defeat is the victory of the sun who scatters the clouds as they wheel in their airy movements round him. These clouds reappear in the brothers of Althaia, and when they are slain her wrath is roused, like the anger of Poseidon when Polyphêmos is blinded, or the rage of Zeus when the Kylôpes are slain. The curse now lies heavy on Meleagros. His voice is no more heard in the council; his spear is seen no more in the fight. He lies idle in his golden chambers with the beautiful Kleopatra; Kephalos is taking his rest with Eôs behind the clouds which hide his face from mortal men, and he will not come forth. Wearied out at last, his mother brings forth the fatal brand and throws it into the fire, and as its last spark flickers out, Meleagros dies. With him die his wife and his mother; Dêianeira and Oinônê cannot live when Heraklês and Paris are gone. So passes away the hero who can only thus be slain, and his sisters who are changed into guinea-hens weep for his death, as the sisters of Phaethôn, the bright fleecy clouds, shed tears of amber over their brother's grave. In this story Phoinix tells Achilleus that he may see a reflexion of himself; and the parallel is closer than perhaps the poet imagined. Like Meleagros, he is a being in whose veins flows the blood of the gods. His mother is the sea-nymph Thetis, for, like Kephalos and Aphrodite, like Athênê and Iamos, the sun-god must rise from the waters; and in the life of his father Peleus the threads of a large number of myths are strangely ravelled together. The tale of his sojourn in Iolkos repeats the story of Bellerophôn and Anteia; and as Proitos sends Bellerophôn that he may be put to death by other hands than his own, so Akastos, the husband who thinks himself injured, leaves Peleus without arms on the heights of Pelion, that the wild beasts may devour him. He is here attacked by Kentaurs, but saved by Cheiron, who gives him back his sword. Here also he becomes the husband of Thetis, at whose wedding-feast the seeds of the strife are sown which produce their baleful fruits in the stealing away of Helen and all its wretched consequences. But the feast itself is made the occasion for the investiture of Peleus with all the insignia of Helios or Phoibos. His lance is the gift of Cheiron: from Poseidon, the god of the air and the waters, come the immortal horses Xanthos and Balios, the golden and speckled steeds which draw the In the Iliad Meleagros does not return home from the fight with the Kourêtes, for the Erinyes who have heard the curse of Althaia overtake him. This is only another form of the myth of Helenê Dendritis. ACHILLEUS IN WOMAN'S GARB. III. 395 chariot of the sun through the sky, or the car of Achilleus on the CHAP. plains of Ilion. For her child Thetis desires, as she herself possesses, the gift of immortality, and the legend, as given by Apollodoros, here introduces almost unchanged the story of Dêmêtêr and Triptolemos. Like the Eleusinian goddess, Thetis bathes her babe by night in fire, to destroy the mortality inherited from his father. Peleus, chancing one day to see the act, cries out in terror, and Thetis leaves his house for ever.1 Of the many stories told of his later years, the myth of the siege of Iolkos and the death of Astydameia repeats that of Absyrtos and has probably the same meaning. The involuntary slaughter of Eurytion finds a parallel in the death of Eunomos, who is unwittingly killed by Heraklês; and the flocks which he offers in atonement to Iros the father, are the flocks which appear in all the legends of Phoibos and Helios. Iros refuses to receive them, and Peleus suffers them to wander untended until they are devoured by a wolf,-a phrase which betrays the nature both of the herds and their destroyer, and carries us to the death of the gentle Prokris. manly When Thetis had vanished away, Peleus carried the child to the The wowise Kentaur Cheiron, who taught him how to ride and shoot,--a Achilleus. myth which at once explains itself when we remember that the Kentaurs are the offspring of Ixîôn and Nephelê. In his earlier years Achilleus resembles the youthful Dionysos, Theseus, and Phoibos, in the womanly appearance of his form,-the gentler aspect of the new risen sun when the nymphs wash him in pure water and wrap him in robes of spotless white. But while his limbs yet showed only the rounded outlines of youth, Kalchas the prophet could still foresee that only with his help could the stronghold of the seducer of Helen be taken, and that none but Achilleus could conquer Hektor. Only the death of his enemy must soon be followed by his own. The night must follow the blazing sunset in which the clouds pour out their streams of blood-red colour, like the Trojan youths slain on the great altar of sacrifice. To avert this doom, if it be possible to do so, Thetis clothed the child, now nine years old, in girlish raiment and placed him in Skyros among the daughters of Lykomedes, where from his golden locks he received the name of Pyrrha. But he could not long be hid and the young boy who had in his infancy been called Ligyron, the whining, was recognised by Odysseus the chieftain of Ithaka as the great champion of the Achaian armies. of Achil Thus was Achilleus engaged in a quarrel which was not his own; The career and on this fact we can scarcely lay a greater stress than he does him- leus. self. The task is laid upon him, as it was on Heraklês or on Perseus; Apollod. iii. 13, 6. na Pribes is beat resed by the wrong done to the gras Curses for dat ofered to Agamemnia a splendid ir is me mi tent ad de mida is given up mi tx lot of ne gre prese le berry on the people. At length the King strigste vi of the derry, but he declares that 2 pace of the mucer off Cross Boses the child of the Vest Frsa stal beke te tens of Achilleus, and this the Tiden I vom Alles hd hrsted his love passes away it the hands of the min woon te merly despeses for his cowardice and is ped. For him the light is tioned out of the sky as thoroughy siis ten of the mys gone when the für hues of morning gre var belire the more mortars is which take their plac Hecate is vaner mx be scary, bet he can take that vengeance on his persent which may act of those who have deprived him ďff is restre He made himself in his tent, or steny sa ca Že sestre, as the s my vel his face behind the drošs vile the bane of the winds goes en beneath them. Then, n the sodden caters of his grid be makes a solemn vow that when the Achains are smitten down by the enemies his sword shall rot be unsberthed the bill; and when his mother comes from her cord caves to comfort him be beseeches her to go to Zeus and pray him to turn the scale of victory on the Trojan side, that the Argives may see what sort of a king they have, and Agamemnon may rue the folly which dishonoured the best and bravest of all the Achaian chieftains So Thetis hasters to Olympos, and Zeus swears to her that Thon shall not fall until the insult done to her son has been fully atoned. But to this Agamemnon will not yet stoop. His chieftains stand around him in unimpaired strength, and the men whom they lead are eager for the conflict. THE WRATH OF ACHILLEUS. 397 III. It was obviously the point at which the poet might pass from the CHAP ry of Achilleus to the exploits of other chieftains, and accordingly any books of the Iliad are taken up with narratives showing what The Iliad. ose chiefs could and could not do without Achilleus. Whether ese narratives formed part of the Iliad in its earliest form, is a point hich we need not examine here; but they are so arranged as to ad to the humiliating confession of Agamemnon that he has lost ɔo many men to be able to continue the struggle with any hope of uccess-a confession which only admits in other words that the conqueror of Ilion is not now in their assembly. The answer is obvious. Briseis must be restored, and Agamemnon must express nis sorrow for all his evil words and evil deeds. If then any attempts were made to appease the wrath of Achilleus before the final reparation which he accepted, it follows that those attempts did not fulfil the conditions on which he insisted, and hence that the ninth of the books of the Iliad, as it now stands, could not possibly have formed part of the original Achillêis or Ilias. The apology which is here rejected is word for word the same as that which is afterwards held to suffice, and the reparation offered after the death of Patroklos is in no way larger than that which had been offered before. The rejection of a less complete submission is, however, in thorough accordance with the spirit of the old myth, and the mediation of Phoinix serves well to exhibit Achilleus to himself in the mirror of the character of Meleagros. 1 acter of But taking the story as it now stands, we may well stand amazed The charat the unbounded savagery of the picture. There is not only no Achilleus. pausing on the part of Achilleus to reflect that Agamemnon has a heart to feel as well as himself, and that the loss of Chrysêis might at least weigh something against that of the daughter of Brisês, but there is not the slightest heed to the sufferings of his countrymen and the hopeless misery of the protracted struggle. The one redeeming feature is his truthfulness, if this can be held to redeem a character which Patroklos describes as fit only for one who is the child of the rugged rocks and the barren sea. If the tears of Patroklos are of any avail, it is not because he tells him of the wretched plight of the Achaian hosts, but because he is his friend, and his friendship is part of himself, his own selfish and personal concern; and thus when that friend prays him, if he will not go forth himself, to let him have his horses, his armour, and his Myrmidons, Achilleus tells him that all his rage is because Agamemnon had taken from him the prize of his bow and spear, and that even now he would not have yielded a jot of his vow, if the war had not at length touched his own ships. When 2 Ib. xvi. 63. 1 II. xvi. 34. BOOK IL Power of tradition. further, his friend has fallen by the hand of Hektor, and Achilleus |