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