"Go, threat thine earth-born Myrmidons; but here
’Tis mine to threaten, prince, and thine to fear.”
But to suppose that the Myrmidons were subservient to any man’s threats, is to give them a very different character from what we find in Homer. Even the epithet “earth-born,” which is Pope’s, not Homer’s, and which may easily be misunderstood, they would have prized as a high compliment, implying that they were no new race, but the aboriginal possessors of their native soil; just as the proud Athenians wore the “golden grasshopper” in their hair, because that insect was fabled to owe its birth to the spontaneous action of the earth. The followers of Achilles were indeed “fierce as ravening wolves,” as the poet has afterwards described them; but they were the very flower of the Greek army, troops of whom any leader might be proud, and if they had a wolfish thirst for blood, they were no worse and no better in this respect than Achilles himself, or any captain in the host before Troy; for an insatiable ferocity, when once the spirit of combativeness is aroused, is the characteristic of all Homer’s heroes, as in those of the medieval romances.
The purpose of the king’s embassy to Achilles is, of course, in pursuance of his threat, to demand the surrender of the fair Briseis. Such a message to such a man is no very safe or agreeable errand. But Agamemnon chooses his envoys well. He sends two heralds—Eurybates and Talthybius. The herald’s office, in early Greek warfare, had an especial sanctity. Those who held it were not mere officials whose name protected them, but men of noble and even of royal birth, who might have been captains of thousands themselves, if they had not chosen, as it were, the civilian’s place
