BOOK
and the sons of Atreus are to him what Polydektes and Eurystheus
had been to the sons of Danae and Alkmene. The men of Ihon had
never ravaged his fields or hurt his cattle ; and not only were his ex-
ploits made to shed lustre on the greedy chiefs who used him for a
tool, but in every battle the brunt of the fight fell upon him, while
almost all the booty went to them. It is the servitude of Phoibos : but
the despot is here a harsher master than Admetos, and the grief which
Achillcus is made to suffer is deeper than that of Apollon when
Daphne vanishes from his sight, or of Herakles when Eurytos refuses
to perform the compact which pledged him to make lole the bride of
the hero. The Achaian camp is visited with a terrible plague. First
the beasts die, then the men, and the smoke of funeral pyres ascends
up everywhere to heaven. At length they learn from Kalchas that
the wrath of Phoibos has been roused by the wrong done to the priest
Chryses who had in vain offered to Agamemnon a splendid ransom
for his daughter, and that not until the maiden is given up will the
hand of the god cease to lie heavy on the people. At length the king
is brought to submit to the will of the deity, but he declares that in
place of the daughter of Chryses, Briseis, the child of the Vedic
Brisaya, shall be torn away from the tents of Achilleus, and thus the
maiden on whom Achilleus had lavished all his love passes away into
the hands of the man whom he utterly despises for his cowardice and
his greed. For him the light is blotted out of the sky as thoroughly
as the first beauty of the day is gone when the fair hues of morning
give way before the more monotonous tints which take their place.
Henceforth his journey must be solitary, but he can take that ven-
geance on his persecutor which the sun may exact of those who have
deprived him of his treasure. He may hide himself in his tent, or
sullenly sit on the sea-shore, as the sun may veil his face behind the
clouds, while the battle of the winds goes on beneath them. Then,
in the sudden outburst of his grief, he makes a solemn vow that when
the Achaians are smitten down by their enemies his sword shall not
be unsheathed in their behalf; and when his mother comes from her
coral caves to comfort him, he beseeches her to go to Zeus and pray
him to turn the scale of victory on the Trojan side, that the Argives
may see what sort of a king they have, and Agamemnon may rue the
folly which dishonoured the best and bravest of all the Achaian chief-
tains. So Thetis hastens to Olympos, and Zeus swears to her that
Ilion shall not fall until the insult done to her son has been fully
atoned. But to this Agamemnon will not yet stoop. His chieftains
stand around him in unimpaired strength, and the men whom they
