“Alas, deep sorrow on our land doth fall!
Yet shall on Priam and his sons alight
Hope, and a great joy on the Trojans all,
Hearing ye waste in bitter feud your might,
Ye twain, our best in counsel and in fight.” (W.)
He proceeds to tell them something of his own long experience, by way of claim on their attention—with something also, as critics have noticed, of an old man’s garrulity. But the reader, it should be remembered, really wants to know something about him, even if the Greeks may have been supposed to have heard his story before.
“In times past
I lived with men—and they despised me not—
Abler in counsel, greater than yourselves.
Such men I never saw and ne’er shall see,
As Pirithous and Dryas, wise and brave,
And Theseus, Œgeus’ more than mortal son.
The mightiest they among the sons of men,
The mightiest they, and of the forest beasts
Strove with the mightiest, and their rage subdued.
With them I played my part; with them, not one
Would dare to fight of mortals now on earth.
Yet they my counsels heard, my voice obeyed;
And hear ye also—for my words are wise.” (D.)
The angry chiefs do hear him so far, that after the interchange of a few more passionate words they leave the council. Achilles stalks off gloomily to his tent, accompanied by his faithful friend and henchman, Patroclus (of whom we shall hear more), and followed by his retinue. Agamemnon proceeds at once to carry out his resolution. He despatches a galley with a trusty crew, under the command of the sage Ulysses, to the island of Chrysa, to restore the old priest’s daughter to him in all honour, with expiatory presents, and the offer of a hecatomb to the Sun-god. They make the voyage quickly, and arrive safely at the island. The rapid movement here of Homer’s verse has rarely been more happily rendered than in the English hexameters of Mr Landon:—
“Out were the anchors cast, and the ropes made fast to the steerage;
Out did the sailors leap on the foaming beach of the ocean;
Out was the hecatomb led for the skilful marksman Apollo;
Out Chryseis arose from the ship that sped through the waters.”
So, by the good priest’s prayers, the god is propitiated, and the plague in the Greek host is stayed.
Meanwhile another embassy, on a very different errand, has been despatched by the King of Men to the tents where Achilles lies, hard by his ships, with his fierce bands of Myrmidons encamped around him. Their name has passed into a by-word, being commonly but incorrectly used to designate an unscrupulous rabble of followers, to whom their leader’s word is law. The notion must be derived not from Homer, but from Pope. In his version of the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles, he makes the former say to his antagonist—
“Go, threat thine earth-born Myrmidons; but here
’Tis mine to threaten, prince, and thine to fear.”
But to suppose that the Myrmidons were subservient to any man’s threats, is to give them a very different character from what we find in Homer. Even the epithet “earth-born,” which is Pope’s, not Homer’s, and which may easily be misunderstood, they would have prized as a high compliment, implying that they were no new race, but the aboriginal possessors of their native soil; just as the proud Athenians wore the “golden grasshopper” in their hair, because that insect was fabled to owe its birth to the spontaneous action of the earth. The followers of Achilles were indeed “fierce as ravening wolves,” as the poet has afterwards described them; but they were the very flower of the Greek army, troops of whom any leader might be proud, and if they had a wolfish thirst for blood, they were no worse and no better in this respect than Achilles himself, or any captain in the host before Troy; for an insatiable ferocity, when once the spirit of combativeness is aroused, is the characteristic of all Homer’s heroes, as in those of the medieval romances.
The purpose of the king’s embassy to Achilles is, of course, in pursuance of his threat, to demand the surrender of the fair Briseis. Such a message to such a man is no very safe or agreeable errand. But Agamemnon chooses his envoys well. He sends two heralds—Eurybates and Talthybius. The herald’s office, in early Greek warfare, had an especial sanctity. Those who held it were not mere officials whose name protected them, but men of noble and even of royal birth, who might have been captains of thousands themselves, if they had not chosen, as it were, the civilian’s place in warfare. Such diplomacy as there was room for in those ages was transacted by them. They were under the special protection of Zeus, as the god of oaths and treaties. There was no fear that the noble chief of the Myrmidons, even in his most furious mood, would treat such envoys rudely. But in fact his reception of them is one of the most remarkable scenes in the poem, both from its high-toned courtesy and from its strong contrast with the hero’s previous bearing towards Agamemnon. Achilles receives the heralds of the king much as a well-bred gentleman of fifty years ago would have received the “friend” who carried a hostile message from one with whom he had a deadly quarrel a few hours before. The demand which they brought from Agamemnon was pointed with the additional threat that, if he refused to give up the damsel, the king would come himself and carry her off by the strong hand,—a threat almost brutal, because quite unwarranted; since Achilles had declared in the council that if the Greeks, who had awarded her as his battle-prize, chose to acquiesce in the injustice of demanding her back from him, he should make no resistance. But it does not seem that the heralds delivered themselves of the additional insult which they were charged to convey. They had no need. As they stand at the entrance of his tent, “troubled and awe-stricken,” loath to begin their unwelcome tale, Achilles sets them at their ease at once in a few calm and dignified words. He recognises in them “the messengers of Zeus”—and if now by accident of Agamemnon, the offence is his, not theirs. He at once bids Patroclus lead forth the damsel, and gives her into their custody, to deal with according to their orders. He repeats his oath, however, though in calmer terms; and calls them to witness before heaven that Agamemnon, in his day of need, shall look in vain for the saving arm of the man he has insulted.