with poised weapon, and hails his enemy as he comes within hurling distance:—
"Prince, thou art met! though late in vain assailed,
The spear may enter where the arrow failed."
It does enter, and piercing through the tough ox-hide of the shield, stands fixed in the breastplate. Again, with premature triumph, he shouts exultingly to Diomed that at last he has got his death-wound. But the Greek quietly tells him that he has missed—which assuredly he himself is not going to do. He hurls his spear in turn with fatal aim: and the poet tells us with ghastly detail how it entered beneath the eyeball, and passed down through the "white teeth" and tongue—
"Till the bright point looked out beneath the chin"—
and Pandarus the Lycian closes his career, free at least from the baseness which medieval romances have attached to his name.
Æneas, in obedience to the laws of heroic chivalry, at once leaps down from the chariot to defend against all comers the body of his fallen comrade.
"And like a lion fearless in his strength
Around the corpse he stalked this way and that,
His spear and buckler round about him held,
To all who dared approach him threat'ning death."
Diomed in this case avails himself of a mode of attack not uncommon with Homer's heroes. He seizes a huge stone—which not two men of this degenerate age (says Homer, with a poet's cynicism for the present) could have lifted—and hurls it at the Trojan prince. It strikes him on the hip, crushes the joint, and brings him to his knees. But that his goddess-mother Venus comes to his rescue, the world had heard the last of Æneas, and
