The night-adventure of Diomed and Odysseus, narrated in the Tenth Iliad, is unmistakably an after-thought and interlude. To what precedes it is in part irrelevant; with what follows it is wholly unconnected; nor is it logically complete in itself. The interpolation is, none the less, of respectable antiquity, going back certainly to the eighth century B.C.; it has high merits of its own, and could ill be spared from the body of what it is convenient to call Homeric poetry. Its admission, to be sure, crowds into one night performances enough to occupy several, but this superfluity of business scarcely troubles any genially disposed reader; nor need he grudge Odysseus the three suppers—one of them perhaps better described as a breakfast—amply earned by his indefatigable services in the epic cause, and counterbalanced by many subsequent privations. The point, however, to be specially noted by us here, is that in the ‘Doloneia’—as the tenth book is designated—equestrian interests, its extraneous origin notwithstanding, are paramount. The opening situation is that magnificently described at the close of the eighth book, when the ‘dark-ribbed ships’ by the Hellespont seemed to cower before the menacing camp-fires of the victorious Trojans. Indeed, most of those who lay in their shadow would gladly have grasped, before it was too late, at the means of escape they offered. Agamemnon’s fluctuating mind, too, might easily have been brought to that inglorious decision; but for the moment, he relieved his restless anxiety by hastily summoning to a nocturnal council a few of the most prominent Achæan chiefs. The somewhat inadequate result of their deliberations was the despatch of a scouting party to the Trojan quarters, Diomed and Odysseus being inevitably chosen for the discharge of the perilous office—inevitably, since in the legend of Troy, these two are again and again coupled in the performance of venturesome, if not questionable, exploits.[98] They had sallied forth unarmed on the sudden summons of the ‘king of men,’ but collected from the sympathetic bystanders a scratch-lot of weapons; and Meriones lent to Odysseus for the emergency a peculiar head-piece of leather lined with felt, and strengthened with rows of boars’ teeth,[99] the like of which, judging from the profusion of sliced tusks met with in Mycenæan graves, was probably familiar of old in the Peloponnesus. Footnote 98: Preller, _Griechische Mythologie_, Bd. ii. p. 405, 3te Auflage. Footnote 99: _Iliad_, x. 261-71.