Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/202

 186 HISTORY OF GREECE. If the initial incident of the second book, whereby we pass out of the Achilleis into the Iliad, is awkward, so also the final inci- dent of the seventh book, immediately before we come back into the Achilleis, is not less unsatisfactory, I mean, the construc- tion of the wall and ditch round the Greek camp. As the poem now stands, no plausible reason is assigned why this should be done. Nestor proposes it without any constraining necessity : for the Greeks are in a career of victory, and the Trojans are making offers of compromise which imply conscious weakness, while Diomedes is so confident of the approaching ruin of Troy, that he dissuades his comrades from receiving even Helen her- self, if the surrender should be tendered. " Many Greeks have been slain," it is true, 1 as Nestor observes ; but an equal or greater number of Trojans have been slain, and all the Grecian heroes are yet in full force : the absence of Achilles is not even adverted to. Now this account of the building of the fortification seems to beginning of the second book was written " by the ancient Homer, or by one of the later Homerids :" he thinks the speech of Agamemnon, wherein he plays off the deceit upon his army, is l; a copious parody (of the same words used in the ninth book) composed by a later Homerid, and inserted in the room of an originally shorter account of the arming of the Greeks." He treats the scene in the Grecian agora as " an entire mythical comedy, full of fine irony and with an amusing plot, in which the deceiving and deceived Agamemnon is the chief character." The comic or ironical character which is here ascribed to the second book appears to me fanciful and incorrect ; but Mailer evidently felt the awkward- ness of the opening incident, though his way of accounting for it is aot successful. The second book seems to my judgment just as serious as any part of the poem. I think also that the words alluded to by 0. Miiller in the ninth book are a transcript of those in the second, instead of the reverse, as he believes, because it seems probable that the ninth book is an addition made to tho poem after the books between the first and the eighth had been already in- serted, it is certainly introduced after the account of the fortification, contained in the seventh book, had become a part of the poem : see ix. 349. The author of the Embassy to Achilles fancied that that hero had been too long out of sight, and out of mind, a supposition for which there was no room in the original Achilleis, when the eighth and eleventh books followed in immediate succession to the first, but which offers itself naturally to anj one on reading our pn sent Iliad. 1 Ili id, vii. 327.