from Agamemnon. For a considerable
time, the combats of the Greeks against Troy were conducted without
their best warrior, and severe, indeed, was the humiliation which they
underwent in consequence. How the remaining Grecian chiefs vainly strove
to make amends for his absence--how Hector and the Trojans defeated and
drove them to their ships--how the actual blaze of the destroying flame,
applied by Hector to the ship of Protesilaus, roused up the anxious and
sympathizing Patroclus, and extorted a reluctant consent from Achilles
to allow his friend and his followers to go forth and avert the last
extremity of ruin--how Achilles, when Patroclus had been killed by
Hector, forgetting his anger in grief for the death of his friend,
reentered the fight, drove the Trojans within their walls with immense
slaughter, and satiated his revenge both upon the living and the dead
Hector,--all these events have been chronicled, together with those
divine dispensations on which most of them are made to depend, in the
immortal verse of the _Iliad_.

Homer breaks off with the burial of Hector, whose body has just been
ransomed by the disconsolate Priam; while the lost poem of Arctinus,
entitled the _AEthiopis_, so far as we can judge from the argument still
remaining of it, handled only the subsequent events of the siege. The
poem of Quintus Smyrnaeus, composed about the fourth century of the
Christian era, seems in its first books to coincide with _AEthiopis_, in
the subsequent books partly with the _Ilias Minor_ of Lesches.

The Trojans, dismayed by the death of Hector, were again animated with
hope by the appearance of the warlike and beautiful queen of the
Amazons, Penthesilia, daughter of Ares, hitherto invincible in the
field, who came to their assistance from Thrace at the head of a band of
her country-women. She again led the besieged without the walls to
encounter the Greeks in the open field; and under her auspices the
latter were at first driven back, until she, too, was slain by the
invincible arm of Achilles. The victor, on taking off the helmet of his
fair enemy as she lay on the ground, was profoundly affected and
captivated by her charms, for which he was scornfully taunted by
Thersites; exasperated by this rash insult, he killed Thersites on the
spot with a blow of his fist. A violent dispute among the Grecian chiefs
was the result, for Diomedes, the kinsman of Thersites, warmly resented
the proceeding; and Achilles wa