Soon after the death of Memnon fate overtakes Achilles himself. When his body, rescued by his friends after much hard fighting, is laid upon its bier, Thetis, his mother, with {65} the Muses and the other sea-goddesses come and sing the funeral dirge. Of this we are told in the last book of the Odyssey (xxiv, 47 ff.) which relates further how his body was burnt, his bones gathered together and entombed under a mound, and the psyche of Achilles departed to the House of Hades; the whole story being told to him in the underworld by the psyche of Agamemnon. But the author of the Aithiopis--always remarkable for his bold innovations in the traditional material--here ventures upon an important new touch. From the funeral pyre, he tells us, Thetis carried off the body of her son and brought him to Leuke.[29\2] That she restored him to life again there and made him immortal the one meagre extract which accident has preserved to us does not say. But there can be no question that that is what the poet narrated--all later accounts conclude the story in this way. The parallel is clear: the two opponents, Achilles and Memnon, are both set free from the fate of mortals by their goddess-mothers. In bodies once more restored to life they continue to live, not among men, nor yet among the gods, but in a distant wonderland--Memnon in the east, Achilles in the "White Island". The poet himself can hardly have imagined Achilles' Island to have been in the Euxine Sea, where, however, later Greek sailors located this purely mythical spot. The translation of Menelaos is still more closely paralleled by the story told in the Telegoneia, which was the final and the latest-written of the Cyclic poems, of the fate which attended the family of Odysseus. Telegonos, the son of Odysseus and Kirke, slays his father unwittingly; when he discovers his mistake he brings the body of Odysseus with Penelope and **Telemachos to his mother, Kirke, who makes them immortal; and there they dwell now (in the Isle Aiaia, far away over the sea, we must suppose--Penelope as the wife of Telegonos, and Kirke with Telemachos.[30\2] § 6