armed with a bow and sword, poising ‘two brass-tipped javelins,’ a panther skin flung round his magnificent form. Elate with the consciousness of strength and beauty, unsuspicious of the betrayal in store for him by his own weak and volatile spirit, the _gaietta pelle_ of the fierce beast might have encouraged, as it did in Dante, a cheerful forecast of the issue; yet illusorily in each case. In the Odyssey, the panther is only mentioned as one of the forms assumed by Proteus. Footnote 164: _Iliad_, iii. 20 (Lord Derby’s trans.). The Homeric wild boar is of quite Erymanthian powers and proportions; with more valour than discretion, he does not shrink from encountering the lion himself— Being ireful, on the lion he will venture; and the laying-low of a single specimen is reckoned no inadequate result of a forest-campaign by dogs and men. Such an heroic brute, worthy to have been the emissary of enraged Artemis, succumbed, no longer ago than in 1850, to the joint efforts, during several toilsome days, of a band of thirty hunters.[165] The ‘chafed boar’ in the Iliad either carries everything before him, as Ajax scattered the Trojans fighting round the body of Patroclus; or he dies, tracked to his lair, if die he must, fearlessly facing his foes, incarnating rage with bristles erected, blazing eyes, and gnashing tusks. Nor was the upshot for him inevitably fatal. Idomeneus of Crete, we are told, awaiting the onset (which proved but partially effective) of Æneas and Deiphobus, Stood at bay, like a boar on the hills that trusteth to his strength, and abides the great assailing throng of men, in a lonely place, and he bristles up his back, and his eyes shine with fire, while he whets his tusks, and is right eager to keep at bay both men and hounds.[166] Footnote 165: Erhard, _Fauna der Cycladen_, p. 26. Footnote 166: _Iliad_, xiii. 471-75.