The Iliad, Homer [short books for teens TXT] 📗

at length the father spoke: “Permit me now, beloved of Jove! to steep My careful temples in the dew of sleep: For, since the day that number’d with the dead My hapless son, the dust has been my bed; Soft sleep a stranger to my weeping eyes; My only food, my sorrows and my sighs!

Till now, encouraged by the grace you give, I share thy banquet, and consent to live.”

 

With that, Achilles bade prepare the bed, With purple soft and shaggy carpets spread; Forth, by the flaming lights, they bend their way, And place the couches, and the coverings lay.

Then he: “Now, father, sleep, but sleep not here; Consult thy safety, and forgive my fear, Lest any Argive, at this hour awake,

To ask our counsel, or our orders take, Approaching sudden to our open’d tent,

Perchance behold thee, and our grace prevent.

Should such report thy honour’d person here, The king of men the ransom might defer; But say with speed, if aught of thy desire Remains unask’d; what time the rites require To inter thy Hector? For, so long we stay Our slaughtering arm, and bid the hosts obey.”

 

“If then thy will permit (the monarch said) To finish all due honours to the dead,

This of thy grace accord: to thee are known The fears of Ilion, closed within her town; And at what distance from our walls aspire The hills of Ide, and forests for the fire.

Nine days to vent our sorrows I request, The tenth shall see the funeral and the feast; The next, to raise his monument be given; The twelfth we war, if war be doom’d by heaven!”

 

“This thy request (replied the chief) enjoy: Till then our arms suspend the fall of Troy.”

 

Then gave his hand at parting, to prevent The old man’s fears, and turn’d within the tent; Where fair Briseis, bright in blooming charms, Expects her hero with desiring arms.

But in the porch the king and herald rest; Sad dreams of care yet wandering in their breast.

Now gods and men the gifts of sleep partake; Industrious Hermes only was awake,

The king’s return revolving in his mind, To pass the ramparts, and the watch to blind.

The power descending hover’d o’er his head: “And sleep’st thou, father! (thus the vision said:) Now dost thou sleep, when Hector is restored?

Nor fear the Grecian foes, or Grecian lord?

Thy presence here should stern Atrides see, Thy still surviving sons may sue for thee; May offer all thy treasures yet contain, To spare thy age; and offer all in vain.”

 

Waked with the word the trembling sire arose, And raised his friend: the god before him goes: He joins the mules, directs them with his hand, And moves in silence through the hostile land.

When now to Xanthus’ yellow stream they drove, (Xanthus, immortal progeny of Jove,)

The winged deity forsook their view,

And in a moment to Olympus flew.

Now shed Aurora round her saffron ray,

Sprang through the gates of light, and gave the day: Charged with the mournful load, to Ilion go The sage and king, majestically slow.

Cassandra first beholds, from Ilion’s spire, The sad procession of her hoary sire;

Then, as the pensive pomp advanced more near, (Her breathless brother stretched upon the bier,) A shower of tears o’erflows her beauteous eyes, Alarming thus all Ilion with her cries: “Turn here your steps, and here your eyes employ, Ye wretched daughters, and ye sons of Troy!

If e’er ye rush’d in crowds, with vast delight, To hail your hero glorious from the fight, Now meet him dead, and let your sorrows flow; Your common triumph, and your common woe.”

 

In thronging crowds they issue to the plains; Nor man nor woman in the walls remains; In every face the self-same grief is shown; And Troy sends forth one universal groan.

At Scaea’s gates they meet the mourning wain, Hang on the wheels, and grovel round the slain.

The wife and mother, frantic with despair, Kiss his pale cheek, and rend their scatter’d hair: Thus wildly wailing, at the gates they lay; And there had sigh’d and sorrow’d out the day; But godlike Priam from the chariot rose: “Forbear (he cried) this violence of woes; First to the palace let the car proceed, Then pour your boundless sorrows o’er the dead.”

 

The waves of people at his word divide, Slow rolls the chariot through the following tide; Even to the palace the sad pomp they wait: They weep, and place him on the bed of state.

A melancholy choir attend around,

With plaintive sighs, and music’s solemn sound: Alternately they sing, alternate flow

The obedient tears, melodious in their woe.

While deeper sorrows groan from each full heart, And nature speaks at every pause of art.

 

First to the corse the weeping consort flew; Around his neck her milk-white arms she threw, “And oh, my Hector! Oh, my lord! (she cries) Snatch’d in thy bloom from these desiring eyes!

Thou to the dismal realms for ever gone!

And I abandon’d, desolate, alone!

An only son, once comfort of our pains, Sad product now of hapless love, remains!

Never to manly age that son shall rise, Or with increasing graces glad my eyes: For Ilion now (her great defender slain) Shall sink a smoking ruin on the plain.

Who now protects her wives with guardian care?

Who saves her infants from the rage of war?

Now hostile fleets must waft those infants o’er (Those wives must wait them) to a foreign shore: Thou too, my son, to barbarous climes shall go, The sad companion of thy mother’s woe;

Driven hence a slave before the victor’s sword Condemn’d to toil for some inhuman lord: Or else some Greek whose father press’d the plain, Or son, or brother, by great Hector slain, In Hector’s blood his vengeance shall enjoy, And hurl thee headlong from the towers of Troy. [257]

For thy stern father never spared a foe: Thence all these tears, and all this scene of woe!

Thence many evils his sad parents bore, His parents many, but his consort more.

Why gav’st thou not to me thy dying hand?

And why received not I thy last command?

Some word thou would’st have spoke, which, sadly dear, My soul might keep, or utter with a tear; Which never, never could be lost in air, Fix’d in my heart, and oft repeated there!”

 

Thus to her weeping maids she makes her moan, Her weeping handmaids echo groan for groan.

 

The mournful mother next sustains her part: “O thou, the best, the dearest to my heart!

Of all my race thou most by heaven approved, And by the immortals even in death beloved!

While all my other sons in barbarous bands Achilles bound, and sold to foreign lands, This felt no chains, but went a glorious ghost, Free, and a hero, to the Stygian coast.

Sentenced, ‘tis true, by his inhuman doom, Thy noble corse was dragg’d around the tomb; (The tomb of him thy warlike arm had slain;) Ungenerous insult, impotent and vain!

Yet glow’st thou fresh with every living grace; No mark of pain, or violence of face:

Rosy and fair! as Phoebus’ silver bow

Dismiss’d thee gently to the shades below.”

 

Thus spoke the dame, and melted into tears.

Sad Helen next in pomp of grief appears; Fast from the shining sluices of her eyes Fall the round crystal drops, while thus she cries.

 

“Ah, dearest friend! in whom the gods had join’d [258]

Tne mildest manners with the bravest mind, Now twice ten years (unhappy years) are o’er Since Paris brought me to the Trojan shore, (O had I perish’d, ere that form divine Seduced this soft, this easy heart of mine!) Yet was it ne’er my fate, from thee to find A deed ungentle, or a word unkind.

When others cursed the authoress of their woe, Thy pity check’d my sorrows in their flow.

If some proud brother eyed me with disdain, Or scornful sister with her sweeping train, Thy gentle accents soften’d all my pain.

For thee I mourn, and mourn myself in thee, The wretched source of all this misery.

The fate I caused, for ever I bemoan;

Sad Helen has no friend, now thou art gone!

Through Troy’s wide streets abandon’d shall I roam!

In Troy deserted, as abhorr’d at home!”

 

So spoke the fair, with sorrow-streaming eye.

Distressful beauty melts each stander-by.

On all around the infectious sorrow grows; But Priam check’d the torrent as it rose: “Perform, ye Trojans! what the rites require, And fell the forests for a funeral pyre; Twelve days, nor foes nor secret ambush dread; Achilles grants these honours to the dead.” [259]

 

{Illustration: FUNERAL OF HECTOR.}{

He spoke, and, at his word, the Trojan train Their mules and oxen harness to the wain, Pour through the gates, and fell’d from Ida’s crown, Roll back the gather’d forests to the town.

These toils continue nine succeeding days, And high in air a sylvan structure raise.

But when the tenth fair morn began to shine, Forth to the pile was borne the man divine, And placed aloft; while all, with streaming eyes, Beheld the flames and rolling smokes arise.

Soon as Aurora, daughter of the dawn,

With rosy lustre streak’d the dewy lawn, Again the mournful crowds surround the pyre, And quench with wine the yet remaining fire.

The snowy bones his friends and brothers place (With tears collected) in a golden vase; The golden vase in purple palls they roll’d, Of softest texture, and inwrought with gold.

Last o’er the urn the sacred earth they spread, And raised the tomb, memorial of the dead.

(Strong guards and spies, till all the rites were done, Watch’d from the rising to the setting sun.) All Troy then moves to Priam’s court again, A solemn, silent, melancholy train:

Assembled there, from pious toil they rest, And sadly shared the last sepulchral feast.

Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,

And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade. [260]

 

CONCLUDING NOTE.

 

We have now passed through the Iliad, and seen the anger of Achilles, and the terrible effects of it, at an end, as that only was the subject of the poem, and the nature of epic poetry would not permit our author to proceed to the event of the war, it perhaps may be acceptable to the common reader to give a short account of what happened to Troy and the chief actors in this poem after the conclusion of it.

 

I need not mention that Troy was taken soon after the death of Hector by the stratagem of the wooden horse, the particulars of which are described by Virgil in the second book of the AEneid.

 

Achilles fell before Troy, by the hand of Paris, by the shot of an arrow in his heel, as Hector had prophesied at his death, lib. xxii.

 

The unfortunate Priam was killed by Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles.

 

Ajax, after the death of Achilles, had a contest with Ulysses for the armour of Vulcan, but being defeated in his aim, he slew himself through indignation.

 

Helen, after the death of Paris, married Deiphobus his brother, and at the taking of Troy betrayed him, in order to reconcile herself to Menelaus her first husband, who received her again into favour.

 

Agamemnon at his return was barbarously murdered by AEgysthus, at the instigation of Clytemnestra his wife, who in his absence had dishonoured his bed with AEgysthus.

 

Diomed, after the fall of Troy, was expelled his own country, and scarce escaped with his life from his adulterous wife AEgiale; but at last was received by Daunus in Apulia, and shared his kingdom; it is uncertain how he died.

 

Nestor lived in peace with his children, in Pylos,