Homer: The Iliad; The Odyssey. W. Lucas Collins
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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,