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Human speech has perhaps never been brought so near to the limit of its capacity of expressing deep emotion as in the scene between Priam and Achilleus in the twenty-fourth book; while the interview between Hektor and Andromache in the sixth similarly wellnigh exhausts the power of language.
Not to accept that spirit is not to accept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end of the first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches its climax in the fourteenth book. Nobody ever believed in Homer's gods, as he must believe in Hektor and Achilles.
Diomedes, single-handed, vanquishes not only the gentle Aphrodite, but even the god of battles himself, the terrible Ares. Nestor quaffs lightly from a goblet which, we are told, not two men among the poet's contemporaries could by their united exertions raise and place upon a table. Aias and Hektor and Aineias hurl enormous masses of rock as easily as an ordinary man would throw a pebble.
So didst thou, son of Diodotos, following the praise of the warrior Meleagros, and of Hektor, and of Amphiaraos, breathe forth the spirit of thy fair-flowering youth amid the company of fighters in the front, where the bravest on slenderest hopes bare up the struggle of war.
All that is one of the accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" in Goethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of those famous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared such speeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, or of Hektor at his parting with Andromache.
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.
Now drive me upward still; say who slew Kyknos, and who Hektor, and the dauntless chief of Ethiop hosts, bronze-mailed Memnon. What man was he who with his spear smote noble Telephos by Kaïkos' banks? Even they whose home my mouth proclaimeth to be Aigina's glorious isle: a tower is she, builded from long ago, to tempt the climb of high-adventuring valour.
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 satisfied either the poet or his hearers. For further particulars I must refer the reader to the excellent criticisms of Mr.
Well able verily is Salamis to rear a man of battles: so at Troy was Hektor aware of Aias; and so now, O Timodemos, art thou glorified by thy stubborn prowess in the pankration. Acharnai of old was famous for its men, and as touching games the Timodemidai rank there pre-eminent.
He it was who stained the vine-clad Mysian plain with the dark blood of Telephos that he shed thereon, and made for the sons of Atreus a safe return across the sea, and delivered Helen, when that he had cut asunder with his spear the sinews of Troy, even the men who kept him back as he plied the work of slaughterous battle on the plain, the strength of Memnon and high-hearted Hektor, and other chiefs of pride.
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