before him? But the wise counsel of Polydamas meets the same fate as that of Ahithophel; Heaven will not suffer men to listen to it. Minerva perverts the understandings of the Trojans, and they prefer the rasher exhortations of Hector, who urges them at all hazards to keep the field.
Thetis, meanwhile, has sought out Vulcan, and bespoken his skill in the forging of new armour for her son. The lame god will work for her, she knows; for in the day when his cruel mother Juno, in wrath at his marvellous ugliness, cast him down from Olympus, she with her sister-goddess Eurynome had nursed him in their bosom till he grew strong. She finds him now hard at work at his forges, in the brazen halls which he has made for himself in heaven. He is completing at this moment some marvellous machinery—twenty tripods mounted on wheels of gold (the earliest hint of velocipedes), which are to move of themselves, and carry him to and fro to the assembly of the gods. Another marvel, too, is to be seen in the Fire-king's establishment, which has long been the desideratum of modern households, but which modern mechanical science has as yet failed to invent—automaton servants, worked by machinery.
"In form as living maids, but wrought in gold,
Instinct with consciousness, with voice endued,
And strength, and skill from heavenly teachers drawn;
These waited duteous at the monarch's side."
Willingly, at the request of the sea-goddess, Vulcan plies his immortal art. Helmet with crest of gold, breastplate "brighter than the flash of fire," and the pliant greaves that mould themselves to the limb, are soon completed. But the marvel of marvels is the
