His wondrous shield and armour—the masterpieces of Vulcan—were left by Thetis as a prize for “the bravest of the Greeks,” and became almost as fatal a source of discord as the golden apple which had been labelled for “the fairest.” Ulysses and Ajax were the most distinguished claimants, and when, as before, counsel was preferred to strength, Ajax went mad with vexation, and fell upon his own sword. Ulysses handed on the coveted armour to its rightful inheritor, the young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who, in accordance with an oracle, had been sent for to take Troy. Still the city held out, secure so long as the sacred image of Minerva, the “Palladium,” a gift from Jupiter himself, remained in the citadel: until Ulysses broke the spell by entering within the walls in disguise, and carrying it off. One quick eye discovered the venturous Greek, through his rags and self-inflicted wounds: Helen recognised him; but she was weary of her guilty life, and became an excusable traitress in favour of her lawful husband. It was again the fertile brain of Ulysses which conceived the stratagem of the wooden horse; and when the curiosity of the Trojans (against all ordinary probabilities, it must be confessed) dragged it inside the walls, the armed warriors whom it contained issued forth in the night, and opened the gates to their comrades.
The details of the sack of the city are neither more nor less horrible than similar scenes which are unhappily too historical. Priam is slain at the altar of his house; his family either share his fate, or are carried into captivity. Of the contradictory legends as to the fate of “Hector’s Andromache”—as in Virgil’s great poem she pathetically calls herself—the reader will gladly choose, with that poet, the least painful version, which leaves her settled at Buthrotus in Epirus, in a peaceful retirement full of gentle regrets, as the wife of Hector’s brother Helenus.
Of Helen and Menelaus we shall hear more in Homer’s tale of the Wanderings of Ulysses. He says nothing of the scene which the later dramatists give us, by no means inconsistent with his own portrait of the pair, when at the taking of the city the outraged husband rushes upon the adulteress with uplifted sword, and drops his weapon at the sight of her well-remembered and matchless beauty. For the miserable sequel of Agamemnon’s story we may refer also to the Odyssey. Few of the Greek heroes returned home in peace. They had insulted the gods of Troy, and they were cursed with toilsome wanderings and long banishment like Ulysses, or met with a worse fate still. Diomed did not indeed leave his wife Ægiale a heart-broken widow, as Dione in her anger had predicted, but found on his return that she had consoled herself with another lover in his absence, and narrowly escaped assassination by her hand. Teucer was refused a home by his father, because he did not bring his brother Ajax back with him to the old man. The lesser Ajax was wrecked and drowned on his homeward voyage. Fate spared Nestor, old as he was, to return to his stronghold at Pylos; but his son Antilochus had fallen in the flower of his age on the plains of Troy. The names of many of the wanderers were preserved in the colonies which they founded along the coasts of Greece and Italy, and the heroes of the great Siege of Troy spread its fame over all the then known world.
END OF THE ILIAD.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
HOMER
———
THE ODYSSEY
BY THE
REV. W. LUCAS COLLINS, M.A.
AUTHOR OF
‘ETONIANA,’ ‘THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS,’ ETC.
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
EDINBURGH AND LONDON
MDCCCLXX