next _tempus pugnae supervenit_ (a stock phrase
of the book) Troilus is again the hero, wounds everybody, including
Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Diomed, and very reasonably opposes a six
months' armistice which his father grants. At its end he again bears
all before him; but, killing too many Myrmidons, he at last excites
Achilles, who, though at first wounded, kills him at last by wounding
his horse, which throws him. Memnon recovers the body of Troilus, but
is himself killed. The death of Achilles in the temple of Apollo (by
ambush, but, of course, with no mention of the unenchanted heel), and
of Ajax and Paris in single fight, leads to the appearance of the
Amazons, who beat the Greeks, till Penthesilea is killed by
Neoptolemus. Antenor, AEneas, and others urge peace, and on failing to
prevail with Priam, begin to parley with the Greeks. There is no
Trojan horse, but the besiegers are treacherously introduced at a gate
_ubi extrinsecus portam equi sculptum caput erat_. Antenor and AEneas
receive their reward; but the latter is banished because he has
concealed Polyxena, who is massacred when discovered by Neoptolemus.
Helenus, Cassandra, and Andromache go free: and the book ends with the
beautifully precise statements that the war, truces and all, lasted
ten years, six months, and twelve days; that 886,000 men fell on the
Greek side, and 676,000 on the Trojan; that AEneas set out in
twenty-two ships ("the same with which Paris had gone to Greece," says
the careful Dares), and 3400 men, while 2500 followed Antenor, and
1200 Helenus and Andromache.

[Sidenote: _Its absurdity._]

This bald summary is scarcely balder than the book itself, which also,
as can be seen from the summary, and would be more fully seen from the
book, has no literary merit of any kind. It reads more like an
excessively uninspired _precis_ of a larger work than like anything
else--a _precis_ in which all the literary merit has, with unvarying
infelicity, been omitted. Nothing can be more childish than the
punctilious euhemerism by which all the miraculous elements of the
Homeric story are blinked or explained away, unless it be the
painstaking endeavour simply to say something different from Homer, or
the absurd alternation of fighting and truces, in which each party
invariably gives up its chance of finishing the war at the precise
time at which that chance is most flourishing, and which reads like a
humorous travesty of the warfare of some histor