While the correct geography may, on this showing, be that of Homer, we cannot give up Homer's claim to Nestor's speech. As to Nestor's tale about the armour of Ereuthalion, it is manifest that the first owner of the armour of Ereuthalion, namely Are'ithous, "the Maceman," so called because he had the singularity of fighting with an iron _casse-tete,_ as Nestor explains (VII. 138-140), was a famous character in legendary history. He appears "as Prince Areithous, the Maceman," father (or grand-father?) of an Areithous slain by Hector (VII. 8-10). In Greece, it was not unusual for the grandson to bear the grandfather's name, and, if the Maceman was grand-father of Hector's victim, there is no chronological difficulty. The chronological difficulty, in any case, if Hector's victim is the son of the Maceman, is not at all beyond a poetic narrator's possibility of error in genealogy. If Nestor's speech is a late interpolation, if its late author borrowed his vivid account of the Maceman and his _casse-tete_ from the mere word "maceman" in VII. 9, he must be credited with a lively poetic imagination. Few or none of these reminiscences of Nestor are really "inapplicable to the context." Here the context demands encouragement for heroes who shun a challenge. Nestor mentions an "applicable" and apposite instance of similar want of courage, and, as his character demands, he is the hero of his own story. His brag, or _gabe,_ about "he was the tallest and strongest of all the men I ever slew," is deliciously in keeping, and reminds us of the college don who said of the Czar, "he is the nicest emperor I ever met." The poet is sketching an innocent vanity; he is not flattering Pisistratus. The next case is the long narrative of Nestor to the hurried Patroclus, who has been sent by Achilles to bring news of the wounded Machaon (XI. 604-702). Nestor on this occasion has useful advice to give, namely, that Achilles, if he will not fight, should send his men, under Patroclus, to turn the tide of Trojan victory. But the poet wishes to provide an interval of time and of yet more dire disaster before the return of Patroclus to Achilles. By an obvious literary artifice he makes Nestor detain the reluctant Patroclus with a long story of his own early feats of arms. It is a story of a "hot-trod," so called in Border law; the Eleians had driven a _creagh_ of cattle from the Pylians, who pursued, and Nestor killed the Eleian leader, Itymoneus. The speech is an Achaean parallel to the Border ballad of "Jamie Telfer of the Fair Dodhead," in editing which Scott has been accused of making a singular and most obvious and puzzling blunder in the topography of his own sheriffdom of the Forest. On Scott's showing the scene of the raid is in upper Ettrickdale, not, as critics aver, in upper Teviotdale; thus the narrative of the ballad would be impossible. [Footnote: In fact both sites on the two Dodburns are impossible; the fault lay with the ballad-maker, not with Scott.]