Leaving the indirect references, one recalls immediately the single picture of childhood which stands among the heroic scenes of the Iliad. When Hector has his memorable parting with Andromache, as related in the sixth book of the Iliad, the child Astyanax is present in the nurse’s arms. Here Chapman is so careless that we desert him, and fall back on a simple rendering into prose of the passage relating to the child:— “With this, famous Hector reached forth to take his boy, but back into the bosom of his fair-girded nurse the boy shrank with a cry, frightened at the sight of his dear father; for he was afraid of the brass,—yes, and of the plume made of a horse’s mane, when he saw it nodding dreadfully at the helmet’s peak. Then out laughed his dear father and his noble mother. Quick from his head famous Hector took the helmet and laid it on the ground, where it shone. Then he kissed his dear son and tossed him in the air, and thus he prayed to Zeus and all the gods.... These were his words, and so he placed the boy, his boy, in the hands of his dear wife; and she received him into her odorous bosom, smiling through her tears. Her husband had compassion on her when he saw it, and stroked her with his hand, spoke to her, and called her by her name.”[5] Like so many other passages in Homer, this at once offers themes for sculpture. Flaxman was right when he presented his series of illustrations to the Iliad and Odyssey in outline, and gave a statuesque character to the groups, though his interpretation of this special scene is commonplace. There is an elemental property about the life exhibited in Homer which the firm boundaries of sculpture most fitly inclose. Thus childhood, in this passage, is characterized by an entirely simple emotion,—the sudden fear of an infant at the sight of his father’s shining helmet and frowning plume; while the relation of maturity to childhood is presented in the strong man’s concession to weakness, as he laughs and lays aside his helmet, and then catches and tosses the child.