Thus each of these great epic poems has one principal event, on which the whole action hinges and which leaves nothing more to be narrated. But with the _Iliad_ it is different. At the end of the _Iliad_ we leave Achilles with his fate still unaccomplished, the Trojan war still undecided. The _Iliad_ has no one great external event or series of events to narrate. It is an episode in the war of Troy, a chapter in the life of Peleus's son. But it does set forth, with the vivid and absorbing interest that attaches to true æsthetic unity, the character of its hero, selecting for that purpose the group of incidents which best display it. The _Iliad_, therefore, has for its whole subject the passion of Achilles--that ardent energy or #MÊNIS# of the hero, which displayed itself first as anger against Agamemnon, and afterwards as love for the lost Patroclus. The truth of this was perceived by one of the greatest poets and profoundest critics of the modern world, Dante. When Dante, in the _Inferno_, wished to describe Achilles, he wrote, with characteristic brevity: Achille, Che per amore al fine combatteo. Achilles, Who at the last was brought to fight by love. In this pregnant sentence Dante sounded the whole depth of the _Iliad_. The wrath of Achilles against Agamemnon, which prevented him at first from fighting; the love of Achilles, passing the love of women, for Patroclus, which induced him to forego his anger and to fight at last--these are the two poles on which the _Iliad_ turns. Two passions--heroic anger and measureless love--in the breast of the chief actor, are the motive forces of the poem. It is this simplicity in the structure of the _Iliad_ which constitutes its nobleness. There is no double plot, no attempt to keep our interest alive by misunderstandings, or treacheries, or thwartings of the hero in his aims. These subtleties and resources of art the poet, whom we will call Homer, for the sake of brevity, discards. He trusts to the magnitude of his chief actor, to the sublime central figure of Achilles, for the whole effect of his epic. It is hardly necessary to insist upon the highly tragic value of this subject. The destinies of two great nations hang trembling in the balance. Kings on the earth below, gods in the heavens above, are moved to turn this way or that the scale of war. Meanwhile the whole must wait upon the passions of one man. Nowhere else, in any work of art, has the relation of a single heroic character to the history of the world been set forth with more of tragic pomp and splendid incident. Across the scene on which gods and men are contending in fierce rivalry moves the lustrous figure of Achilles, ever potent, ever young, but with the ash-white aureole of coming death around his forehead. He too is in the clutch of destiny. As the price of his decisive action, he must lay his life down and retire with sorrow to the shades.