s of war to the "Swift-footed." The hero of Thessaly
thenceforth refuses to join in the war, and sullenly shuts himself
up in his tent. It is only when his dear friend Patroclus has been
slain by the valiant Hector, eldest son of Priam, that he sallies
forth, meets Hector in single combat, and finally slays him.
Achilles then attaches the body of Hector to his chariot and
insultingly trails it in the dust as he drives three times around
the walls of Troy. The _Iliad_ closes with the funeral rites
celebrated over the corpse of Hector.

We now arrive at the capital and culminating point of the Grecian
epic--the two sieges and captures of Troy, with the destinies of the
dispersed heroes, Trojan as well as Grecian, after the second and most
celebrated capture and destruction of the city.

It would require a large volume to convey any tolerable idea of the vast
extent and expansion of this interesting fable, first handled by so many
poets, epic, lyric, and tragic, with their endless additions,
transformations, and contradictions,--then purged and recast by
historical inquirers, who, under color of setting aside the
exaggerations of the poets, introduced a new vein of prosaic
invention,--lastly, moralized and allegorized by philosophers. In the
present brief outline of the general field of Grecian legend, or of that
which the Greeks believed to be their antiquities, the Trojan war can be
regarded as only one among a large number of incidents upon which
Hecataeus and Herodotus looked back as constituting their fore-time.
Taken as a special legendary event, it is, indeed, of wider and larger
interest than any other, but it is a mistake to single it out from the
rest as if it rested upon a different and more trustworthy basis. I
must, therefore, confine myself to an abridged narrative of the current
and leading facts; and amid the numerous contradictory statements which
are to be found respecting every one of them, I know no better ground of
preference than comparative antiquity, though even the oldest tales
which we possess--those contained in the _Iliad_--evidently presuppose
others of prior date.

The primitive ancestor of the Trojan line of kings is Dardanus, son of
Zeus, founder and eponymus of Dardania: in the account of later authors,
Dardanus was called the son of Zeus by Electra, daughter of Atlas, and
was further said to have come from Samothrace, or from Arcadia, or from
It