Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/432

BOOK II.

tokening his appearance in fiercer strength on the morrow. When to the bidding of Iris, that he should go forth to avenge his friend, he replies that he has no arms, the goddess bids him show himself in the trenches without them. Like the sudden flash of the sun, when as he approaches the horizon his light breaks from behind the dense veil of vapours, is the shout of Achilleus ringing through the air. It if absurd to thmk of any human warrior, or to suppose that any hyper- bole could suggest or justify the poet's words, as he tells us how the dazzling light thrown from his face reached up to the high ether of Zeus, and how the horses of the Trojans felt the woes that were coming, and their drivers were astonished, as they beheld the awful fire kindled on the head of the great-hearted son of Peleus by the dawn-goddess Pallas Athene. But for the present there is the blaze of light, and nothing more. At the bidding of Here the sun goes down, and the strife is stayed. But as the hours of the night wear on, the fire-god toils on the task which Thetis prays him to undertake; and when the mighty disk of the shield and the breastplate more dazzling than the fiercest fire are ready, Thetis flies with them to her son Hke a hawk winging its way from the snow-clad Olympos.

The arming and vengeance of Achilleus.The hour of vengeance is now indeed come. As his mother lays before him the gifts of Hephaistos, his eyes flash like the lightning, and his only fear is that while he is fighting, the body of Patroklos may decay. But Thetis bids him be of good cheer. No unseemly thing shall come near to mar that beautiful form, though it should lie unheeded the whole year round. There can be now no delay, and no pause in the conflict The black clouds have hidden the face of Achilleus long enough; but now he will not eat before his deadly task is done. He is braced for the final struggle by a sight which he had scarcely hoped to see again. The Achaian chiefs appear to make the submission of Agamemnon, and like lole coming to Herakles, or Antigone to the dying Oidipous, Briseis is restored to him unscathed as when she was torn away from his tent In her grief for Patroklos, whom she had left full of life, we have the grief of the dawn for the death of the sun in his gentler aspect. In him there had been no fierceness, and if his gentler temper went along with a lack of strength, like that of Phaethon in the chariot of Helios, he was none the less deserving of her love. In the arming which follows we have, as plainly as words can paint it, the conflagration of the heavens : and the phrases used by the poet, if regarded as a description of any earthly hero and any earthly army, might be pronounced a series of monstrous hyperboles with far greater justice than the hundred-headed narcissus to which Colonel Mure applies the term when speaking of the myth of Per-