Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/214

 198 HISTORY OF GREECE preceding, seems explicable only on the supposition that they are the latter cantos, and come in designed sequence, as the contin- uance of a previous plan. The poet wishes to surround the coming forth of Achilles with the maximum of glorious and terrific circumstance ; no Trojan enemy can for a moment hold out against him : l the gods must descend to the plain of Troy and light in person, while Zeus, who at the beginning of the eighth book, had forbidden them to take part, expressly encourages them to do so at the beginning of the twentieth. If, then, the nine- teenth book (which contains the reconciliation between Achilles and Agamemnon, a subject naturally somewhat tame) and the three following books (where we have before us only the gods, Achilles, and the Trojans, without hope or courage) are inferior in execution and interest to the seven preceding books (which describe the long-disputed and often doubtful death-struggle between the Greeks and Trojans without Achilles), as "Wolf and other critics affirm, we may explain the difference without sup- posing a new poet as composer ; for the conditions of the poem had become essentially more difficult, and the subject more unpromising. The necessity of keeping Achilles above the level, even of heroic prowess, restricted the poet's means of acting upon the sympathy of his hearers. 2 ' Iliad, xx. 25. Zeus addresses die agora of the gods, 'A/i^orepotut 6' upy-yer', 5ii~>j voof tarlv iKaarov Et yap 'At/Qei>f oio ini Tpusaat fiaxelrac, Ovde fiiwv&' Covert irodunea Hijfaiuva. Kat 6s fiiv Kol irpoodev iiroTpOfieeffKov opuvref Ni)v <P ore 6r) nal -&vfj,bv iraipov <jrai aivuf, Addu /IT) Kal Tft^of vxsp [iopov kZaX(nrd!-T). The formal restriction put upon the gods by Zeus at the beginning of the eighth book, and the removal of that restriction at the beginning of the twentieth, are evidently parts of one preconceived scheme. It is difficult to determine whether the battle of the gods and goddesses in book xxi. (385-520) is to be expunged as spurious, or only to be blamed as of inferior merit ("improbanda tantum, non resecanda hoc enim est illnd, quo plerumque summa criseos Homericse red~tt," as Heyne observes in another place, Obss. Iliad, xviii. 444). The objections on the score of non- Homeric locution are not forcible (see P. Knight, ad foe.), and the scene belongs to that vein of conception which animates the poet in the closing act of his Achilleis. f While admitting that these last books of the Iliad Are not equal in