Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/200

 184 HISTORY OF GREECE. presents, tendered from the Greeks, indicates an implacability such as neither the first book, nor the books between the eleventh and seventeenth, convey. It is with the Grecian agora, in the beginning of the second book, that the Iliad (as distinguished from the Achilleis) com- mences, continued througi the Catalogue, the muster of the two armies, the single combat between Menelaus and Paris, the renewed promiscuous battle caused by the arrow of Pandarus, the (Epipolesis, or) personal circuit of Agamemnon round the army, the Aristeia, or brilliant exploits of Diomedes, the visit of Hector to Troy for the purposes of sacrifice, his interview with Andromache, and his combat with Aj;ix, down to the seventh book. All these are beautiful poetry, presenting to us the general Trojan war, and its conspicuous individuals under different points of view, but leaving no room in the reader's mind for the thought of Achilles. Now, the difficulty for an enlarging poet, was, to pass from the Achilleis in the first book, to the Iliad in the second, and it will accordingly be found that here is an awkward- ness in the structure of the poem, which counsel on the poet's behalf (ancient or modern) do not satisfactorily explain. In the first book, Zeus has promised Thetis, that he will pun- ish the Greeks for the wrong done to Achilles : in the beginning of the second book, he deliberates how he shall fulfil the promise, and sends down for that purpose " mischievous Oneirus " (the Dream-god) to visit Agamemnon in his sleep, to assure him that the gods have now with one accord consented to put Troy into his hands, and to exhort him forthwith to the assembling of his army for the attack. The ancient commentators were here per- plexed by the circumstance that Zeus puts a falsehood into the mouth of Oneirus. But there seems no more difficulty in explain- ing this, than in the narrative of the book of 1 Kings (chap. xxii. 20), where Jehovah is mentioned to have put a lying spirit into the mouth of Ahab's prophets, the rtal awkwardness is, that Oneirus and his falsehood produce no effect. For in the first place, Agamemnon takes a step very different from that which his dream recommends, and in the next place, when the Gre- cian army is at length armed and goes forth to battle, it does not experience defeat, (which would be the case if the exhoitation of Onsirus really proved mischievous,) but carries on a successful