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Rh lead their horses round the bier. While Achilles sleeps the deep sleep of exhaustion after the long day's battle, the shade of his dead friend appears to him, and chides him for leaving him so long unburied, a wandering ghost in the gloom below.

As eager now to do honour to Achilles as he was before to insult him, Agamemnon has despatched a strong force at early dawn to cut down wood for a huge funeral pile. The burial rites are grandly savage. In long procession and in full panoply the Myrmidons bear the dead hero to the pile, and the corpse is covered with the long locks of hair which every warrior in turn, Achilles first, cuts off as an offering to the gods below. Four chariot-horses, and two dogs "that had fed at their master's board," are slain upon the pile, to follow him, in case he should have need of them, into the dark