Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/332

300 Thetis celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of her son, and offered the unrivalled panoply, which Hephsestos had forged and wrought for him, as a prize to the most distinguished warrior in the Grecian army. Odysseus and Ajax became rivals for the distinction, when Athene, together with some Trojan prisoners, who were asked from which of the two their country had sustained greatest injury, decided in favor of the former. The gallant Ajax lost his senses with grief and humiliation : in a fit of phrenzy he slew some sheep, mistaking them for the men who had wronged him, and then fell upon his own sword.

Odysseus now learnt from Helenus son of Priam, whom he had captured in an ambuscade, that Troy could not be taken unless both Philoktetes,and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, could be prevailed upon to join the besiegers. The former, having been stung in the foot by a serpent, and becoming insupportable to the Greeks from the stench of his wound, had been left at Lemnus in