Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/66

42 Idomeneus, and even Menelaus, have successively been made more than a match for him. In that aspect Hector has lost, but he has gained more. The prevailing sympathy of the later books is with him. The two most explicit moral judgments in the poems are against Achilles for maltreating him, The gods keep his body whole, and rebuke his enemy's savagery. The scenes in, the parting with Andromache, the comforting of little Astyanax frightened at his father's plume, the calm acceptance of a battle which must be fatal, and of a cause which must be lost—all these are in the essence of great imagination; but the absolute masterpiece, one of the greatest feats of skill in imaginative literature, is the flight of Hector in. It is simple fear, undisguised; yet you feel that the man who flies is a brave man. The act of staying alone outside the gate is much; you can just nerve yourself to it. But the sickening dread of Achilles' distant oncoming grows as you wait, till it simply cannot be borne. The man must fly; no one can blame him; it is only one more drop in the cup of divine cruelty, which is to leave Hector dead, Troy burned, Astyanax butchered, and Andromache her enemy's slave. If the old poet went with the conqueror, and exulted in Hector's shame, there has come one after him who takes all his facts and turns them the other way; who feels how far more intense the experience of the conquered always is, and in this case how far more noble.

The wonder is that Achilles is not spoilt for us. Somehow he remains grand to the end, and one is grieved, not alienated, by the atrocities his grief leads him to. The last touch of this particular spirit is where Achilles receives