Evades the stroke; he, dashing through the brake,
Shrill-shrieking, pounces on his destin’d prey;
So, wing’d with desp’rate hate, Achilles flew,
So Hector, flying from his keen pursuit,
Beneath the walls his active sinews plied.[[174]]
[174]. Iliad, xxii. 139-44 (Lord Derby’s trans.).
In popular Russian parlance, too, ‘the hurricane in the field, and the luminous hawk in the sky,’ are the favourite metaphors of swiftness.[[175]] Only that Homer’s falcon has no direct relations with light; and of those indirectly traceable in the one phrase connecting him with Apollo, the poet himself was certainly not cognisant.
[175]. Gubernatis, Zoological Mythology, vol. ii. p. 193.
Vultures always lurk behind the scenes, as it were, of the Homeric battle-stage. The abandonment to their abhorrent offices of the bodies of the slain formed one of the chief terrors of death in the field, and presented a much-dreaded means of enhancing the penalties of defeat. The carrion-feeding birds perpetually on the watch to descend from the clouds upon the blood-stained plain of Ilium, are clearly ‘griffon-vultures,’ Vultur fulvus; but the ‘bearded vulture,’ Gypaëtus barbatus, the Lämmergeier of the Germans, which, like the eagle, pursues live prey, occasionally lends, in a figure, the swoop and impetus of its flight to vivify some incident of extermination.[[176]] Both species occur in modern Greece.[[177]]
[176]. Odyssey, xxii. 302; Iliad, xvi. 428, xvii. 460.