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In speaking to Nestor, Agamemnon awakens sympathy: "Me, of all the Achaeans, Zeus has set in toil and labour ceaselessly." They are almost the very words of Charlemagne in the Chanson de Roland: "Deus, Dist li Reis, si peneuse est ma vie." The author of the Doloneia consistently conforms to the character of Agamemnon as drawn in the rest of the Iliad.

The vase painters often illustrate the Doloneia; but it does not follow that "the story was fresh" because it was "popular," as Mr. The sixth century vase painters illustrated many passages in Homer, not the Doloneia alone. The "comic way" was the ruthless humour of two strong warriors capturing one weak coward.

The scholiasts merely babble. Let us follow again the sequence of events. With him in command were Meriones and five other young men less notable. They had supplies with them and whatever was needed: they cooked supper in bivouac. In the Doloneia the wakeful princes, after inspecting the advanced guard, go forward within view of the Trojan ranks and consult.

It is not always remembered that, if things could drop into the interpolations, things could also drop out of the ILIAD, causing lacunae, during the dark backward of its early existence. If the Doloneia be "barely Homeric," as Father Browne holds, this opinion was not shared by the listeners or readers of the sixth century.

Is the poet not to be allowed to be various, and is the scene of the Porter in Macbeth, "in style and tone," like the rest of the drama? Here, of course, Shakespeare indulges infinitely more in "comedy of a rough practical kind" than does the author of the Doloneia. The Iliad, like the sagas, is rich in this extremely practical humour. Mr. Leaf dates in the middle of the sixth century.

It is enough for us to have shown that if Odyssean varies from Iliadic language, in all other respects the two poems bear the marks of the same age. Meanwhile, a Homeric scholar so eminent as Mr. This merely proves that they did not find any necessity for the existence of the DOLONEIA. Mr. To understand the problem of the DOLONEIA, we must make a summary of its contents.