The whole story, including Book ix., is absolutely consistent. Grote argued that Agamemnon, by his offers, had done all that was necessary. He had, according to customary law; but Achilles had set his heart, in Book i. as in Book ix., on much more, on "a contented revenge." In Book ix. he had not enjoyed his revenge, and he said as much. Had he yielded in Book ix., the prophecy of Zeus in Book viii. would have been falsified;[15] the doom of Zeus would have been frustrated; the bitter word of Achilles would have been broken; he would have deserved no heart-breaking disaster. Grote sees nothing of all this, nor do his followers.
When Agamemnon sent his embassy with apologies and offers of atonement to Achilles, in Book ix., the Achaeans had not been punished as Achilles, from the first, expressed his desire to see them smitten. Diomedes had shore in the day of his valour, his aristeia; Hector had the worse in his passage-of-arms with Aias; Hera and Athene had abetted the Trojans; and though they camped in the plain, they had not smitten the foe "by the prows of the ships"; nor were they even likely to do so, for the Achaeans had built the wall and dug the trench around the ships. Therefore the demand of Achilles was not yet granted; and though Agamemnon abjectly implored forgiveness and offered the customary atonement, that was not what Achilles wanted. He spurns the gifts, and repeats the whole long story of his wrongs.[16] Agamemnon, he says, has a ceaseless grudge against him: the king's submission is merely hypocritical, and Achilles declines to be deceived. "Let him not tempt me, who know him too well; he will not persuade me"[17] "His gifts are hateful to me"; not for ten times these gifts will Achilles be reconciled, till he has glutted his revenge.
The long speech of Phoenix[18] partly mollifies him, and, in place of persisting in his intention to sail homewards at once, he tells Aias that he will not fight till Hector comes, slaying the Argives, even to the ships of the Myrmidons.[19] This is an advance even on his demand in Book i. In short, Achilles abides by his determination as announced to his mother in the first Book of the Iliad, and goes further. He is consistent.
To this resolve, and to his plighted word (for he "hated a liar as the gates of Hades"), Achilles is as constant as the fond of his character—an unexampled tenderness—permitted him to be. This tenderness of the fierce hero who, in grief, cries to his mother like a child; who, in the height of his passion, compares his own labours for the Achaeans to those of "the hen-bird that brings to her unfledged chickens whatsoever morsel she may find, and it goes hard with herself";[20] who likens the suppliant Patroclus to "the little girl that, running beside her mother, and catching at her skirts, cries to be taken up in her arms"; and who gives quarter to fallen foes, distinguishes Achilles. The contrast between this emotion and his pride and later ferocity makes his character; and his chivalry shines out most clearly in his reception of Priam, which is declared to be un-Homeric! The triumph of his fierce pride over his tenderness, when he refuses the gifts in Book ix., is the ἁμάρτημα, the sin or blot on a noble character, which is the keynote, or pivot, of Greek tragedy (as in the Oedipous Tyrannos), and of the Iliad.
Remove Book ix., and Achilles is no longer himself, there is no motived tragedy, and the supposed primal kernel, the fancied Achilleid (wherein atonement is not offered or refused), is a poem without a motive. The heart of Achilles is to be broken by the loss of Patroclus, though, according to the ideas of the age, he has committed no wrong; he has renounced his allegiance when he had a right to renounce it till he had received atonement for an intolerable injustice.
Grote did not think himself back into the legal and ethical atmosphere of Homeric life; he and his followers have failed to understand the moral centre of the tragedy, the ἁμάρτημα, the sin of Achilles. In place of doing that they have found the great discrepancy, exactly where they should have found the central situation and turning point of the epic. It has, in Aristotelian phrase, "a beginning, a middle, and an end." Book ix. is the middle. The critics excise it!
Grote works out his discovery thus, and in answering him we answer his contemporary followers. Achilles, in Book xi., sees the rout of the Achaeans, and sees Nestor conveying a wounded comrade to the rear. Achilles says to Patroclus (xi. 608), "Now methinks that the Achaeans will stand about my knees, praying to me, for need no longer endurable is coming upon them" That is, he will soon get the terms which he has from the first demanded, revenge, and, following perfect revenge, the humiliation of the Achaeans. Grote says that Heyne "not unnaturally asks, 'had Achilles repented of his previous harshness to the embassy,' in Book ix., 'or was he arrogant enough to expect a second embassy'? I answer, 'Neither one nor the other: the words imply that he had received no embassy at all.'" Therefore Book ix. is a later interpolation.
It follows that the great poet of Book ix., who so consistently maintains the attitude taken by Achilles in Book i. 408-410, where the hero demands the slaughter of the Achaeans among their ships,[21] now unscrupulously throws over and destroys the work of his still greater predecessor. Here is indeed a matchless discrepancy in human nature!
As I understand the words of Achilles (xi. 608, 610), he is joyously anticipating the moment when "need no longer endurable" will come on the host. In Book ix. their necessity, as we have demonstrated, had not reached the point which, in Books i. and ix., he had demanded. Hector has not yet reached the ships, not yet do the Achaeans know fully "what manner of king they have" in his enemy, Agamemnon. Doubtless they will again beseech Achilles: they have done that already, but they have not yet suffered as he will have them suffer. There is here extreme consistency, not impossible inconsistency. Achilles retains the position which he took up in Book i.