[306] While admitting that these last books of the Iliad are not equal in interest with those between the eleventh and eighteenth, we may add that they exhibit many striking beauties, both of plan and execution, and one in particular may be noticed as an example of happy epical adaptation. The Trojans are on the point of ravishing from the Greeks the dead body of Patroclus, when Achilles (by the inspiration of Hêrê and Iris) shows himself unarmed on the Grecian mound, and by his mere figure and voice strikes such terror into the Trojans that they relinquish the dead body. As soon as night arrives, Polydamas proposes, in the Trojan agora, that the Trojans shall retire without farther delay from the ships to the town, and shelter themselves within the walls, without awaiting the assault of Achilles armed on the next morning. Hector repels this counsel of Polydamas with expressions,—not merely of overweening confidence in his own force, even against Achilles,—but also of extreme contempt and harshness towards the giver; whose wisdom, however, is proved by the utter discomfiture of the Trojans the next day. Now this angry deportment and mistake on the part of Hector is made to tell strikingly in the twenty-second book, just before his death. There yet remains a moment for him to retire within the walls, and thus obtain shelter against the near approach of his irresistible enemy, but he is struck with the recollection of that fatal moment when he repelled the counsel which would have saved his countrymen: “If I enter the town, Polydamas will be the first to reproach me, as having brought destruction upon Troy on that fatal night when Achilles came forth, and when I resisted his better counsel.” (Compare xviii. 250-315; xxii. 100-110; and Aristot. Ethic. iii. 8.)
In a discussion respecting the structure of the Iliad, and in reference to arguments which deny all designed concatenation of parts, it is not out of place to notice this affecting touch of poetry, belonging to those books which are reproached as the feeblest.
[307] The latter portion of the seventh book is spoiled by the very unsatisfactory addition introduced to explain the construction of the wall and ditch: all the other incidents (the agora and embassy of the Trojans, the truce for burial, the arrival of wine-ships from Lemnos, etc.) suit perfectly with the scheme of the poet of these books, to depict the Trojan war generally.
[308] Unless, indeed, we are to imagine the combat between Tlepolemus and Sarpêdon, and that between Glaukus and Diomêdês, to be separate songs; and they are among the very few passages in the Iliad which are completely separable, implying no special antecedents.
[309] Compare also Heyne, Excursus ii. sect. ii. ad Iliad. xxiv. vol. viii. p. 783.
[310] Subsequent poets, seemingly thinking that the naked story, (of Diomêdês slaughtering Rhêsus and his companions in their sleep,) as it now stands in the Iliad, was too displeasing, adopted different ways of dressing it up. Thus, according to Pindar (ap. Schol. Iliad. x. 435), Rhêsus fought one day as the ally of Troy, and did such terrific damage, that the Greeks had no other means of averting total destruction from his hand on the next day, except by killing him during the night. And the Euripidean drama, called Rhêsus, though representing the latter as a new-comer, yet puts into the mouth of Athênê the like overwhelming predictions of what he would do on the coming day, if suffered to live; so that to kill him in the night is the only way of saving the Greeks (Eurip. Rhês. 602): moreover, Rhêsus himself is there brought forward as talking with such overweening insolence, that the sympathies of man, and the envy of the gods, are turned against him (ib. 458).
But the story is best known in the form and with the addition (equally unknown to the Iliad) which Virgil has adopted. It was decreed by fate that, if the splendid horses of Rhêsus were permitted once either to taste the Trojan provender, or to drink of the river Xanthus, nothing could preserve the Greeks from ruin (Æneid, i. 468, with Servius, ad loc.):—
“Nec procul hinc Rhesi niveis tentoria velis
Agnoscit lacrymans: primo quæ prodita somno
Tydides multâ vastabat cæde cruentus: