“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 set the battle in array; and the second book of the Iliad closes with the long muster-roll of the Greek clans under their respective kings or chiefs on the one side, and of the Trojans and their allies on the other, which in our introduction has already been partly anticipated.[14] The long list of chiefs, with their genealogies and birthplaces, and the strength of their several contingents, was evidently composed with a view to recitation: and whatever may be its value as an authentic record, we can understand the interest with which a Greek audience would listen to a muster-roll which was to them what the Roll of Battle Abbey was to the descendants of the Normans in England. If here and there, upon occasion, the wandering minstrel inserted in the text the name and lineage of some provincial hero on his own responsibility, the popular applause would assuredly be none the less.
CHAPTER II.
THE DUEL OF PARIS AND MENELAUS.
The battle is set in array, “army against army.” But there is a difference in the bearing of the opposed forces which is very significant, and is probably a note of real character, not a mere stroke of the poet’s art. The Trojan host, after the fashion of Asiatic warfare, modern as well as ancient, move forward to the combat with loud shouts and clashing of weapons. The poet compares their confused clamour to the noise of a flock of cranes on their annual migration. The Greeks, on the other hand, march in silence, with closed ranks, uttering no sound, but “breathing determination.” So, when afterwards they actually close for action, not a sound is heard in their ranks but the voice of the leaders giving the word of command. “You would not think,” says the poet, “that all that mighty host had tongues;” while, in the mixed battalions of the enemy, whose allies are men of many lands and languages, there arises a noisy discordant clamour—“like as of bleating ewes that hear the cries of their lambs.”
But while the hostile forces yet await the signal for the battle, Paris springs forth alone from the Trojan ranks. “Godlike” he is in his beauty, and with the leve of personal adornment which befits his character, he wears a spotted leopard’s hide upon his shoulders. Tennyson’s portrait of him, though in a different scene, is thoroughly Homeric—
“White-breasted like a star,
Fronting the dawn he moved; a leopard’s skin
Drooped from his shoulder, but his sunny hair
Clustered about his temples like a god’s.”