Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/216

 200 HISTORY OF GREECE. in tone and language. To a certain extent, the peculiarities of the last book appear to me undeniable, though it K plainly a designed continuance, and not a substantive poem. Some weight also is due to the remark about the twenty-third book, that Odysseus and Diomedes, who have been wounded and disabled during the fight, now reappear in perfect force, and contend in the games : here is no case of miraculous healing, and the incon- sistency is more likely to have been admitted by a separate enlarging poet, than by the schemer of the Achilleis. The splendid books from the second to v. 322 of the seventh, 1 are equal, in most parts, to any portion of the Achilleis, and are pointedly distinguished from the latter by the broad view which they exhibit of the general Trojan war, with all its principal personages, localities, and causes, yet without advancing the result promised in the first book, or, indeed, any final purpose whatever. Even the desperate wound inflicted by Tlepolemus on Sarpedon, is forgotten, when the latter hero is called forth in the subsequent Achilleis. 2 The arguments of Lachmann, who dissects these six books into three or four separate songs, 3 carry no conviction to my mind ; and I see no reason why we should not consider all of them to be by the same author, bound together by the common purpose of giving a great collective picture which may properly be termed an Iliad. The tenth book, or Doloneia, though adapted specially to the place in which it stands, agrees with the books between the first and eighth in belonging only to the general picture of the war, without helping forward the march of the Achilleis ; yet it seems conceived in a lower vein, in so far as we can trust our modern ethical sentiment. One is 1 The latter portion of the seventh book is spoiled by the very unsatisfac- tory addition introduced to explain the construction of the wall and ditch : all the other incidents (the agora and embassy of the Trojans, the truce for burial, the arrival of wine-ships from Lemnos, etc.) suit perfectly with the scheme of the poet of these books, to depict the Trojan war generally. Sarpedon, and that between Glaukus and Diomedes, to be separate songs ; and they are among the very few passages in the Iliad which are completely separable, implying no special antecedents. 3 Compare also Heyne, Excursus ii. sect. ii. ad Iliad, xxiv. vol. viii p. 783.
 * Unless, indeed, we are to imagine the combat between Tlepolemus and