Heyne, in his comment, asks the question, not unnaturally, “Pœnituerat igitur asperitatis erga priorem legationem, an homo arrogans expectaverat alteram ad se missam iri?” I answer, neither one nor the other: the words imply that he had received _no embassy_ at all. He is still the same Achilles who in the first book paced alone by the seashore, devouring his own soul under a sense of bitter affront, and praying to Thetis to aid his revenge: this revenge is now about to be realized, and he hails its approach with delight. But if we admit the embassy of the ninth book to intervene, the passage becomes a glaring inconsistency for that which Achilles anticipates as future, and even yet as contingent, _had actually occurred_ on the previous evening; the Greeks _had_ supplicated at his feet,—they _had proclaimed_ their intolerable need,—and he had spurned them. The Scholiast, in his explanation of these lines, after giving the plain meaning, that “Achilles shows what he has long been desiring, to see the Greeks in a state of supplication to him,”—seems to recollect that this is in contradiction to the ninth book, and tries to remove the contradiction, by saying “that he had been previously mollified by conversation with Phœnix,”—ἤδη δὲ προμαλαχθεὶς ἦν ἐκ τῶν Φοίνικος λόγων,—a supposition neither countenanced by anything in the poet, nor sufficient to remove the difficulty. 2. The speech of Poseidôn (xiii. 115) to encourage the dispirited Grecian heroes, in which, after having admitted the injury done to Achilles by Agamemnôn, he recommends an effort to heal the sore, and intimates “that the minds of good men admit of this healing process,” (Ἀλλ᾽ ἀκεώμεθα θᾶσσον· ἀκεσταί τε φρένες ἐσθλῶν,) is certainly not very consistent with the supposition that this attempt to heal _had been made_ in the best possible way, and that Achilles had manifested a mind implacable in the extreme on the evening before,—while the mind of Agamemnôn was already brought to proclaimed humiliation, and needed no farther healing. 3. And what shall we say to the language of Achilles and Patroclus, at the beginning of the sixteenth book, just at the moment when the danger has reached its maximum, and when Achilles is about to send forth his friend?