The comic or ironical character which is here ascribed to the second book appears to me fanciful and incorrect; but Müller evidently felt the awkwardness of the opening incident, though his way of accounting for it is not successful. The second book seems to my judgment just as serious as any part of the poem.
I think also that the words alluded to by O. Müller in the ninth book are a transcript of those in the second, instead of the reverse, as he believes,—because it seems probable that the ninth book is an addition made to the poem after the books between the first and the eighth had been already inserted,—it is certainly introduced after the account of the fortification, contained in the seventh book, had become a part of the poem: see ix. 349. The author of the Embassy to Achilles fancied that that hero had been too long out of sight, and out of mind,—a supposition for which there was no room in the original Achillêis, when the eighth and eleventh books followed in immediate succession to the first, but which offers itself naturally to any one on reading our present Iliad.
[294] Iliad, vii. 327.
[295] Heyne treats the eighth book as decidedly a separate song, or epic; a supposition which the language of Zeus and the agora of the gods at the beginning are alone sufficient to refute, in my judgment (Excursus 1, ad lib. xi. vol. vi. p. 269). This Excursus, in describing the sequence of events in the Iliad, passes at once and naturally from book eighth to book eleventh.
And Mr. Payne Knight, when he defends book eleventh against Heyne, says, “Quæ in undecimâ rhapsodiâ Iliadis narrata sunt, haud minus ex ante narratis pendent: neque rationem pugnæ commissæ, neque rerum in eâ gestarum nexum atque ordinem, quisquam intelligere posset, nisi iram et secessum Achillis, et victoriam quam Trojani inde consecuti erant, antea cognosset.” (Prolegom. c. xxix.)
Perfectly true: to understand the eleventh book, we must have before us the first and the eighth (which are those that describe the anger and withdrawal of Achilles, and the defeat which the Greeks experience in consequence of it); we may dispense with the rest.
[296] O. Müller (Hist. Greek Literat. ch. v. § 6) says, about this wall: “Nor is it until the Greeks are taught by the experience of the first day’s fighting, that the Trojans can resist them in open battle, that the Greeks build the wall round their ships.... This appeared to Thucydidês so little conformable to historical probability, that, without regard to the authority of Homer, he placed the building of these walls immediately after the landing.”
It is to be lamented, I think, that Thucydidês took upon him to determine the point at all as a matter of history; but when he once undertook this, the account in the Iliad was not of a nature to give him much satisfaction, nor does the reason assigned by Müller make it better. It is implied in Müller’s reason that, before the first day’s battle, the Greeks did not believe that the Trojans could resist them in open battle: the Trojans (according to him) never had maintained the field, so long as Achilles was up and fighting on the Grecian side, and therefore the Greeks were quite astonished to find now, for the first time, that they could do so.
Now nothing can be more at variance with the tenor of the second and following books than this supposition. The Trojans come forth readily and fight gallantly; neither Agamemnôn, nor Nestor, nor Odysseus consider them as enemies who cannot hold front; and the circuit of exhortation by Agamemnôn (Epipôlêsis), so strikingly described in the fourth book, proves that he does not anticipate a very easy victory. Nor does Nestor, in proposing the construction of the wall, give the smallest hint that the power of the Trojans to resist in the open field was to the Greeks an unexpected discovery.
The reason assigned by Müller, then, is a fancy of his own, proceeding from the same source of mistake as others among his remarks; because he tries to find, in the books between the first and eighth, a governing reference to Achilles (the point of view of the Achillêis), which those books distinctly refuse. The Achillêis was a poem of Grecian disasters up to the time when Achilles sent forth Patroclus; and during those disasters, it might suit the poet to refer by contrast to the past time when Achilles was active, and to say that then the Trojans did not dare even to present themselves in battle-array in the field, whereas now they were assailing the ships. But the author of books ii. to vii. has no wish to glorify Achilles: he gives us a picture of the Trojan war generally, and describes the Trojans, not only as brave and equal enemies, but well known by the Greeks themselves to be so.