Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/428

396 BOOK and the sons of Atreus are to him what Polydektes and Eurystheus had been to the sons of Danae and Alkmene. The men of Ihon had never ravaged his fields or hurt his cattle ; and not only were his ex- ploits made to shed lustre on the greedy chiefs who used him for a tool, but in every battle the brunt of the fight fell upon him, while almost all the booty went to them. It is the servitude of Phoibos : but the despot is here a harsher master than Admetos, and the grief which Achillcus is made to suffer is deeper than that of Apollon when Daphne vanishes from his sight, or of Herakles when Eurytos refuses to perform the compact which pledged him to make lole the bride of the hero. The Achaian camp is visited with a terrible plague. First the beasts die, then the men, and the smoke of funeral pyres ascends up everywhere to heaven. At length they learn from Kalchas that the wrath of Phoibos has been roused by the wrong done to the priest Chryses who had in vain offered to Agamemnon a splendid ransom for his daughter, and that not until the maiden is given up will the hand of the god cease to lie heavy on the people. At length the king is brought to submit to the will of the deity, but he declares that in place of the daughter of Chryses, Briseis, the child of the Vedic Brisaya, shall be torn away from the tents of Achilleus, and thus the maiden on whom Achilleus had lavished all his love passes away into the hands of the man whom he utterly despises for his cowardice and his greed. For him the light is blotted out of the sky as thoroughly as the first beauty of the day is gone when the fair hues of morning give way before the more monotonous tints which take their place. Henceforth his journey must be solitary, but he can take that ven- geance on his persecutor which the sun may exact of those who have deprived him of his treasure. He may hide himself in his tent, or sullenly sit on the sea-shore, as the sun may veil his face behind the clouds, while the battle of the winds goes on beneath them. Then, in the sudden outburst of his grief, he makes a solemn vow that when the Achaians are smitten down by their enemies his sword shall not be unsheathed in their behalf; and when his mother comes from her coral caves to comfort him, he beseeches her to go to Zeus and pray him to turn the scale of victory on the Trojan side, that the Argives may see what sort of a king they have, and Agamemnon may rue the folly which dishonoured the best and bravest of all the Achaian chief- tains. So Thetis hastens to Olympos, and Zeus swears to her that Ilion shall not fall until the insult done to her son has been fully atoned. But to this Agamemnon will not yet stoop. His chieftains stand around him in unimpaired strength, and the men whom they lead are eager for the conflict.