thing else excite and interest his audience: his lay must be rich in incident; and to an audience who were all more or less warlike, no incidents could be so exciting as the details of battle. There is much savageness in Homer's combats; but savageness is to the taste of men whose only means of excitement is through their grosser senses, and a love of the horrible in fact or fiction is by no means extinct even in our own day.
Young Antilochus, the son of Nestor's old age, draws the first blood in the battle. He kills Echepolus.
"Beneath his horsehair-plumed helmet's peak
The sharp spear struck; deep in his forehead fixed,
It pierced the bone: then darkness veiled his eyes,
And, like a tower, amid the press he fell."
Over his dead body the combat grows furious—the Greeks endeavouring to drag him off to strip his armour, the Trojans to prevent it. The armour of a vanquished enemy was, in these combats, something like what an enemy's scalp is to the Indian "brave;" to carry it off in triumph, and hang it up in their own tents as a trophy, was the great ambition of the slayer and his friends. Ajax, too, slays his man — spearing him right through from breast to shoulder: and the tall Trojan falls like a poplar—
"Which with his biting axe the wheelwright fells."
Ulysses, roused by the death of a friend who is killed in trying to carry off this last body, rushes to the front, and poising his spear, looks round to choose his victim. The foremost of his enemies recoil; but he drives his weapon right through the temples of Demophoon, a natural son of Priam, as he sits high in his chariot. The Trojans waver; even Hector gives ground; the Greeks cheer, and some carry off the bodies, while the
