Ganelon's advice prevailing, it is necessary to send an envoy to the Saracen court. It is a dangerous mission; other envoys have been sent and been murdered. The Peers, however, volunteer, beginning with the aged Naismes, the Nestor of the Franks. His offer is not accepted, nor are those of Oliver, Roland, and Turpin. Roland then proposes that Ganelon shall be sent; and hence arises the Wrath of Ganelon, which was the ruin of Roland and the peers who stood by him. The warriors attack each other in speeches of Homeric fury. Charles preserves his dignity, and Ganelon departs on his mission. He deliberately sells himself, and seals the fate of the peers whom he detests: the surprise of the rearguard under Roland, the deadly battle, and the revenge of Charles make up the rest of the poem. Not even in victory is Charles allowed repose; the trumpet again summons him to war. He is of those whom Heaven has called to endless combat-- "Their whole lives long to be winding Skeins of grievous wars, till every soul of them perish," in the words of Diomede. Such is the picture of the imperial Charles in one of the oldest of the French epics. The heart of the poet is with the aged, but unbroken and truly imperial, figure of St. Charlemagne--wise, just, and brave, a true "shepherd of the people," regarded as the conqueror of all the known kingdoms of the world. He is, among his fierce paladins, like "the conscience of a knight among his warring members." "The greatness of Charlemagne has entered even into his name;" but as time went on and the feudal princes began the long struggle against the French king, the poets gratified their patrons by degrading the character of the Emperor. They created a second type of Charles, and it is the second type that on the whole most resembles the Agamemnon of the _Iliad._ We ask why the widely ruling lord of golden Mycenae is so skilfully and persistently represented as respectable, indeed, by reason of his office, but detestable, on the whole, in character? The answer is that just as the second type of Charles is the result of feudal jealousies of the king, so the character of Agamemnon reflects the princely hatreds of what we may call the feudal age of Greece. The masterly portrait of Agamemnon could only have been designed to win the sympathies of feudal listeners, princes with an Over-Lord whom they cannot repudiate, for whose office they have a traditional reverence, but whose power they submit to with no good will, and whose person and character some of them can barely tolerate. [blank space] _an historical unity._ The poem deals with what may be called a feudal society, and the attitudes of the Achaean Bretwalda and of his peers are, from beginning to end of the _Iliad_ and in every Book of it, those of the peers and king in the later _Chansons de Geste_.