Myrmi lead their horses round the bier. While Achilles sleeps the deep sleep of exhaustion after the long day's battle, the shade of his dead friend appears to him, and chides him for leaving him so long unburied, a wandering ghost in the gloom below.
"Sleep'st thou, Achilles, mindless of thy friend,
Neglecting not the living, but the dead?
Hasten my fun'ral rites, that I may pass
Through Hades' gloomy gates; ere those be done,
The spirits and spectres of departed men
Drive me far from them, nor allow to cross
Th' abhorred river; but forlorn and sad
I wander through the widespread realms of night.
And give me now thy hand, whereon to weep;
For never more, when laid upon the pyre,
Shall I return from Hades; never more,
Apart from all our comrades, shall we two,
As friends, sweet counsel take; for me, stern Death,
The common lot of man, has ope'd his mouth;
Thou too, Achilles, rival of the gods,
Art destined here beneath the walls of Troy
To meet thy doom; yet one thing must I add,
And make, if thou wilt grant it, one request:
Let not my bones be laid apart from thine,
Achilles, but together, as our youth
Was spent together in thy father's house." (D.)
As eager now to do honour to Achilles as he was before to insult him, Agamemnon has despatched a strong force at early dawn to cut down wood for a huge funeral pile. The burial rites are grandly savage. In long procession and in full panoply the Myrmidons
bear the dead hero to the pile, and the corpse is covered
with the long locks of hair which every warrior in turn,
Achilles first, cuts off as an offering to the gods below.
Four chariot-horses, and two dogs "that had fed at their master's board," are slain upon the pile, to follow
him, in case he should have need of them, into the dark
