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124 Juno, Neptune, Minerva, Mercury, and Vulcan assist the Greeks: Mars, Venus, Apollo, Latona, and Diana join the Trojans. Their interference seems, at least to our modern taste, to assist in no way the action of the poem, and merely tends to weaken for the time the human interest. We must be content to assume that upon a Greek audience the impression was different. The only effect which these immortal allies produce upon the fortunes of the day is a negative one; Apollo incites Æneas to encounter Achilles, and when he is in imminent danger, Neptune conveys him away in a mist. Apollo performs the same office for Hector, who also engages the same terrible adversary, in the hope of avenging upon him the death of his young brother Polydorus. Disappointed in both his greater antagonists, Achilles vents his wrath in indiscriminate slaughter. Driving through the disordered host of the Trojans, his chariot wheels and axle steeped in blood, he cuts the mass of fugitives in two, and drives part of them into the shallows of the river Scamander. Leaping down from his chariot, he wades into the river, and there continues his career of slaughter sword in hand. Twelve Trojan youths he takes alive and hands them over to his followers; sparing them for the present only to slay them hereafter as victims at the funeral-pile to appease the shade of Patroclus. Another suppliant for his mercy has a singular history. The young Lycaon, one of the many sons of Priam, had been taken prisoner by him in one of his raids upon Trojan territory, and sold as a slave in Lemnos. He had been ransomed there and sent home to Troy, only twelve days before he fell into his enemy's hands again here in the bed of the Scamander. Achilles recognises him,