and vowed to Lycian-born Apollo, the renowned archer, that he would sacrifice a splendid hecatomb of firstling lambs, having returned home to the city of sacred Zeleia. Having seized them, he drew together the notch [of the arrow] and the ox-hide string; the string, indeed, he brought near to his breast, and the barb to the bow. But after he had bent the great bow into a circle, the bow twanged, the bowstring rang loudly, and the sharp-pointed shaft bounded forth, impatient to wing its flight through the host.
Nor did the blessed immortal gods forget thee, O Menelaus;[1] but chiefly the spoil-hunting daughter of Jove, who, standing before thee, averted the deadly weapon. She as much repelled it from thy body, as a mother repels a fly from her infant, when it shall have laid itself down in sweet sleep. But she herself guided it to that part where the golden clasps of the girdle bound it, and the double-formed corselet met.[2] The bitter arrow fell on his well-fitted belt, and through the deftly-wrought belt was it driven, and it struck in the variegated corselet and the brazen-plated belt which he wore, the main defense of his body, a guard against weapons, which protect him most; through even this did it pass onward, and the arrow grazed the surface of the hero's skin, and straightway black gore flowed from the wound. And as when some Mæonian[3] or Carian woman tinges ivory with purple color, to be a cheek-trapping for steeds; in her chamber it lies, and many charioteers desire to bear it, but it lies by as an ornament for the king, both as a decoration to the steed, and a glory to the rider: so Menelaus, were thy well-proportioned thighs, and legs, and fair feet below, stained with gore.
Then Agamemnon, the king of men, shuddered, as he beheld the black gore flowing from the wound, and Mars-
- ↑ It is elegantly observed by Coleridge, p. 160, that "it is principally owing to our sense of the dramatic probability of the action of the divinities in the Iliad that the heroes do not seem dwarfed by their protectors; on the contrary, the manifest favorite of the gods stands out in a dilated and more awful shape before our imagination, and seems, by the association, to be lifted up into the demigod."
- ↑ Occurrebat sagittæ, obvius erat ei penetranti."—Heyne. But it is better to understand, "where the plates of the cuirass meet and overlay the ζῶμα."—Arnold.
- ↑ i. e., Lydian.
