Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/70

48 48 HISTORY OP THE vidual character, without obscuring the chief hero and the main action of the poem. One legendary subject, of this extent and interest, Homer found in the anger of Achilles ; and another in the return of Ulysses. § 5. The first is an event which did not long precede the final destruction of Troy ; inasmuch as it produced the death of Hector, who was the defender of the city. It was doubtless the ancient tradition, established long before Homer's time, that Hector had been slain by Achilles, in revenge for the slaughter of his friend Patroclus : whose fall in battle, unprotected by the son of Thetis, was explained by the tradi- tion to have arisen from the anger of Achilles against the other Greeks for an affront offered to him, and his consequent retirement from the contest. Now the poet seizes, as the most critical and momentous period of the action, the conversion of Achilles from the foe of the Greeks into that of the Trojans ; for as, on the one hand, the sudden revolution in the fortunes of war, thus occasioned, places the prowess of Achilles in the strongest light, so, on the other hand, the change of his firm and reso- lute mind must have been the more touching to the feelings of the hearers. From this centre of interest there springs a long preparation and gradual development, since not only the cause of the anger of Achilles, but also the defeats of the Greeks occasioned by that anger, were to be narrated ; and the display of the insufficiency of all the other heroes at the same time offered the best opportunity for exhibiting their several excellencies. It is in the arrangement of this preparatory part and its connexion with the catastrophe that the poet displays his perfect acquaintance with all the mysteries of poetical composition ; and in his continued postponement of the crisis of the action, and his scanty reve- lations with respect to the plan of the entire work, he shows a maturity of knowledge, which is astonishing for so early an age. To all appearance the poet, after certain obstacles have been first overcome, tends only to one point, viz. to increase perpetually the disasters of the Greeks, which they have drawn on themselves by the injury offered to Achilles : and Zeus himself,at the beginning, is made to pronounce, as coming from him- self, the vengeance and consequent exaltation of the son of Thetis. At the same time, however, the poet plainly shows his wish to excite in the feelings of an attentive hearer an anxious and perpetually increasing desire, not only to see the Greeks saved from destruction, but also that the unbearable and more than human haughtiness and pride of Achilles should be broken. Both these ends are attained through the fulfil- ment of the secret counsel of Zeus, which he did not communicate to Thetis, and through her to Achilles (who, if he had known it, would have given up all enmity against the Achaeans), but only to Hera, and to her not till the middle of the poem* ; and Achilles, through the loss she herself did not know of it. II. xviii. 63. Zeus also long conceals his planq
 * Thetis hail said nothing to Achilles of the loss of Patroclus (II. xvii. 411), for