of victory, a warrior's death, and undying glory. He makes his choice as a hero should—
"One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
One fable runs that his mother, Thetis, dipped him when an infant in the river Styx, which made him invulnerable in every point except the heel, by which she held him:[1] but there is no mention of this in the Iliad, and he goes into battle, for all that appears, as liable to wounds and death as any other mortal warrior, and with a presentiment that the last awaits him before the capture of Troy is complete.
At length the ten years' preparations were all completed. The harbour of Aulis on the coast of Bœotia was the place fixed for the rendezvous. From every quarter where the great race of the Achaeans had settled,—from the wooded valleys of Thessaly, from all the coasts of the Peloponnesus, and the neighbouring islands, from Ithaca and Cephallenia on the west to Crete and Rhodes on the east—the chiefs and their following were gathered. A hundred ships—long half-decked row-galleys, whose average complement was about eighty men—were manned from Agamemnon's own kingdom of Mycenæ, and he supplied also sixty more to carry the contingent of the Arcadians, who, as an inland people, had no fleet of their own. His brother Menelaus brought sixty; Nestor of Pylos,
- ↑ The legend bears a remarkable resemblance to that of the hero Siegfried, in the German 'Nibelungen Lied.' By bathing in the blood of the slain dragon he acquires the same property of invulnerability, with the exception of one spot on his back which had been kept dry by a fallen leaf. And he meets his death, like Achilles, by a wound in that spot, dealt treacherously.
B
