laborious precautions for security necessary? We will not ask, why the Trojans should stand quietly by and permit a wall to be built, since the truce was concluded expressly for burying the dead.[296] [295] Heyne treats the eighth book as decidedly a separate song, or epic; a supposition which the language of Zeus and the agora of the gods at the beginning are alone sufficient to refute, in my judgment (Excursus 1, ad lib. xi. vol. vi. p. 269). This Excursus, in describing the sequence of events in the Iliad, passes at once and naturally from book eighth to book eleventh. And Mr. Payne Knight, when he defends book eleventh against Heyne, says, “Quæ in undecimâ rhapsodiâ Iliadis narrata sunt, haud minus ex ante narratis pendent: neque rationem pugnæ commissæ, neque rerum in eâ gestarum nexum atque ordinem, quisquam intelligere posset, nisi _iram et secessum_ Achillis, et _victoriam_ quam Trojani inde consecuti erant, antea cognosset.” (Prolegom. c. xxix.) Perfectly true: to understand the eleventh book, we must have before us the first and the eighth (which are those that describe the anger and withdrawal of Achilles, and the defeat which the Greeks experience in consequence of it); we may dispense with the rest. [296] O. Müller (Hist. Greek Literat. ch. v. § 6) says, about this wall: “Nor is it until the Greeks are _taught by the experience of the first day’s fighting_, that the Trojans can resist them in open battle, that the Greeks build the wall round their ships.... This appeared to Thucydidês so little conformable to historical probability, that, without regard to the authority of Homer, he placed the building of these walls immediately after the landing.” It is to be lamented, I think, that Thucydidês took upon him to determine the point at all as a matter of history; but when he once undertook this, the account in the Iliad was not of a nature to give him much satisfaction, nor does the reason assigned by Müller make it better. It is implied in Müller’s reason that, before the first day’s battle, the Greeks did not believe that the Trojans _could_ resist them in open battle: the Trojans (according to him) never had maintained the field, so long as Achilles was up and fighting on the Grecian side, and therefore the Greeks were quite astonished to find now, for the first time, that they _could_ do so.