food and wine—"for therein do lie both strength and courage"—and then betake themselves to their no less needful rest: ready, so soon as "the rosy-fingered dawn " appears, to set the battle fearlessly in array, in front of their ships and tents, against this redoubtable Hector.
But
"Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."
There is no rest for the King of Men, who has the fate of a national armament on his soul. He looks forth upon the plain, where the thousand watchfires of the enemy are blazing out into the night, and hears the confused hum of their thick-lying battalions, and the sounds of the wild Eastern music with which they are enlivening their revels, and celebrating their victory by anticipation. He rises from his troubled couch, determined to hold a night-council with Nestor and other chiefs of mark. He is donning his armour, when he is visited by his brother Menelaus—for he too has no rest, thinking of the dire straits into which in his sole cause the armies of Greece are driven. The royal brothers go in different directions through the camp, and quietly rouse all the most illustrious captains. Nestor is the guiding spirit in the council, as before. He advises a reconnoissance of the enemy's lines under cover of the darkness. The office of a spy, be it remembered, was reckoned in these old times, as in the days of the Hebrew commonwealth, a service of honour as well as of danger; and the kings and chiefs of the Greeks no more thought it beneath their dignity than Gideon did in the case of the Midianites. The man who could discover for them the counsels of Hector would win for himself not only a solid reward, but an immortal name—
