EXTENT OF THE ACHILLEIS. 179 offers to restore Briseis, and pay the amplest compensation for past wrong. 1 The words of Achilles (not less than those of 1 Observe, for example, the following passages : 1. Achilles, standing on the prow of his ship, sees the general army of Greeks undergoing defeat by the Trojans, and also sees Nestor conveying in his chariot a wounded warrior from the field. He sends Patroclus to find out who the wounded man is: in calling forth Patroclus, he says (xi. 607), A2e Mei'omu<5>;, rcj '(Uo) Kexeptoftfve i9iy/<p, Kvv olu irepl yovvar' ipu aTTjaeadai 'A^euoiif Ataffo/isvovf xP ' iu yup iKuverat OVKET' uveKTOf. Ileyne, in his comment, asks the question, not unnaturally, " Poenituerat igitur asperitatis erga priorem legationem, an homo arrogans expectaverat ulteram ad se missam iri 1 " I answer, neither one nor the other : the words imply that he had received no embassy at all. He is still the same Achilles who in the first book paced alone by the seashore, devouring his own soul under a sense of bitter affront, and praying to Thetis to aid his revenge: this revenge is now about to be realized, and he hails its approach with delight. But if we admit the embassy of the ninth book to intervene, the passage becomes a glaring inconsistency for that which Achilles anticipates as future, and even yet as contingent, had actually occurred on the previous even- ing ; the Greeks had supplicated at his feet, they had proclaimed their intol- erable need, and he had spurned them. The Scholiast, iu his explanation of these lines, after giving the plain meaning, that " Achilles shows what he has long been desiring, to see the Greeks in a state of supplication to him," seems to recollect that this is in contradiction to the ninth book, and tries to remove the contradiction, by saying " that he had been previously molli- fied by conversation with Phoenix," rjSri 6s irpo/j.a'kax'&eii: ijv in TUV <koivi- KOf /toywv, a supposition neither countenanced by anything in the poet, nor sufficient to remove the difficulty. 2. The speech of Poseidon (xiii. 115) to encourage the dispirited Grecian heroes, in which, after having admitted the injury done to Achilles by Aga- memnon, he recommends an effort to heal the sore, and intimates " that the minds of good men admit of this healing process," ('AAA' uKeufieda du.aaov uKearai re (jtpevec or?Awv,) is certainly not very consistent with the supposi- tion that this attempt to heal had been made in the best possible way, and that Achilles had manifested a mind implacable in the extreme on the evening before, while the mind of Agamemnon was already brought to proclaimed humiliation, and needed no farther healing. 3. And what shall we say to the language of Achilles and Patroclus, at the beginning of the sixteenth book, just at the moment when the danger has reached its maximum, and when Achilles is about to send forth his friend 1 Neither Nestor, when he invokes and instructs Patroclus as interccssoi with Achilles (xi. 654-790). nor Patroclus himself, though in the extreme
