after the charioteer Automedon, whom the immortal horses carry off safe from his pursuit. Then donning the armour of Achilles, so lately worn by Patroclus, he leads on the Trojans to seize the dead body, which Menelaus is gallantly defending. After a long and desperate contest, the Greeks, locking their shields together in close phalanx, succeed in carrying it off, the two Ajaxes keeping the assailants at bay. Jupiter, in pity to the dead hero, casts a veil of darkness round him. But this embarrasses the movements of friends as well as enemies, and gives rise to a characteristic outburst on the part of Ajax, often quoted. He can fight best when he sees his way. "Give us but light, Jove, and in the light, if thou seest fit, destroy us!"
We have now reached the crisis of the story. The wrath of Achilles against Agamemnon wanes and pales before the far more bitter wrath which now fills his whole soul against Hector, as the slayer of his comrade. Young Antilochus, son of Nestor, brings the mournful tidings to his tent, where he sits already foreboding the result, as he sees the Greeks crowding back to their galleys from the field in front of Troy. His grief is frantic—he tears his hair, and heaps dust upon his head, after a fashion which strongly suggests the Eastern character of the tale. His goddess-mother, Thetis "of the silver feet," hears him,
"Beside her aged father where she sat,
In the deep ocean-caves,"
and comes with all her train of sea-nymphs to console him, as when before he sat weeping with indignation at the insult of Agamemnon. In vain she strives to comfort him with the thought that his insulted honour has been fully satisfied—that the Greeks have bitterly rued
