to the poem
a somewhat wider scope, have not at any rate changed its primitive
character of an Achilleis. To my mind they seem even called for by the
original conception of the consequences of the wrath. To have inserted
the battle at the ships, in which Sarpedon breaks down the wall of the
Greeks, immediately after the occurrences of the first book, would have
been too abrupt altogether. Zeus, after his reluctant promise to Thetis,
must not be expected so suddenly to exhibit such fell determination. And
after the long series of books describing the valorous deeds of Aias,
Diomedes, Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Menelaos, the powerful intervention
of Achilleus appears in far grander proportions than would otherwise
be possible. As for the embassy to Achilleus, in the ninth book, I
am unable to see how the final reconciliation with Agamemnon would be
complete without it. As Mr. Gladstone well observes, what Achilleus
wants is not restitution, but apology; and Agamemnon offers no apology
until the nineteenth book. In his answer to the ambassadors, Achilleus
scornfully rejects the proposals which imply that the mere return of
Briseis will satisfy his righteous resentment, unless it be accompanied
with that public humiliation to which circumstances have not yet
compelled the leader of the Greeks to subject himself. Achilleus is not
to be bought or cajoled. Even the extreme distress of the Greeks in the
thirteenth book does not prevail upon him; nor is there anything in the
poem to show that he ever would have laid aside his wrath, had not the
death of Patroklos supplied him with a new and wholly unforeseen motive.
It seems to me that his entrance into the battle after the death of his
friend would lose half its poetic effect, were it not preceded by some
such scene as that in the ninth book, in which he is represented as deaf
to all ordinary inducements. As for the two concluding books, which Mr.
Grote is inclined to regard as a subsequent addition, not necessitated
by the plan of the poem, I am at a loss to see how the poem can be
considered complete without them. To leave the bodies of Patroklos
and Hektor unburied would be in the highest degree shocking to Greek
religious feelings. Remembering the sentence incurred, in far less
superstitious times, by the generals at Arginusai, it is impossible to
believe that any conclusion which left Patroklos's manes unpropitiated,
and the mutilated corpse of Hektor unransomed, could have s