The eagle is virtually the Homeric king of birds. He is in the Iliad ‘the most perfect,’ as well as ‘the strongest and swiftest of flying things’; his appearances in both poems, often expressly ordained by Zeus, are always momentous, and are, accordingly, eagerly watched and solicitously interpreted; moreover, they never deceive; to disregard the warning they convey is to rush spontaneously to destruction. It is only, however, in the Twenty-fourth Iliad, usually regarded as subsequent, in point of composition, to the cantos embodying the primitive legend of the ‘Wrath of Achilles,’ that the eagle begins to be marked out as the special envoy of Zeus. Later, the companionship became so close as to justify Æschylus in implying that the bird was in lieu of a dog to the ‘father of gods and men.’ The position, on the other hand, assigned, in one passage of the Odyssey, to the hawk as the ‘swift messenger’ of Apollo, was not maintained. The Hellenic Phœbus eventually disclaimed all relationship with the hawk-headed Horus of the Nile Valley. The rapidity, however, of the hawk’s flight, and his agility in the pursuit of his prey, furnish our poet, again and again, with terms of comparison. Here is an example, taken from the description of the deadly duel outside the Scæan gate. As when a falcon, bird of swiftest flight, From some high mountain top on tim’rous dove Swoops fiercely down; she, from beneath, in fear, Evades the stroke; he, dashing through the brake, Shrill-shrieking, pounces on his destin’d prey; So, wing’d with desp’rate hate, Achilles flew, So Hector, flying from his keen pursuit, Beneath the walls his active sinews plied.[174] Footnote 174: _Iliad_, xxii. 139-44 (Lord Derby’s trans.). In popular Russian parlance, too, ‘the hurricane in the field, and the luminous hawk in the sky,’ are the favourite metaphors of swiftness.[175] Only that Homer’s falcon has no direct relations with light; and of those indirectly traceable in the one phrase connecting him with Apollo, the poet himself was certainly not cognisant. Footnote 175: Gubernatis, _Zoological Mythology_, vol. ii. p. 193. Vultures always lurk behind the scenes, as it were, of the Homeric battle-stage. The abandonment to their abhorrent offices of the bodies of the slain formed one of the chief terrors of death in the field, and presented a much-dreaded means of enhancing the penalties of defeat. The carrion-feeding birds perpetually on the watch to descend from the clouds upon the blood-stained plain of Ilium, are clearly ‘griffon-vultures,’ _Vultur fulvus_; but the ‘bearded vulture,’ _Gypaëtus barbatus_, the _Lämmergeier_ of the Germans, which, like the eagle, pursues live prey, occasionally lends, in a figure, the swoop and impetus of its flight to vivify some incident of extermination.[176] Both species occur in modern Greece.[177] Footnote 176: