The hero of heroes, Achilles, who bears on his shoulders the destinies of Troy, owing to a private wrong he had received from Agamemnon--a grave wrong, but an insufficient motive for the ruin of his country and his whole nation--condemned all the Greeks to defeat and destruction at the hands of Hector; and he only determined to aid them in order to assuage the personal grief caused by Hector's slaying his friend Patroclus. If only this extreme aloofness had been due to passion and jealousy! But though when Agamemnon deprived him of Briseis he made enough noise to fill heaven and earth and supply the plot of the entire _Iliad,_ yet he never in the whole course of the poem shows a spark of real love: just as Menelaus mustered the whole of Greece against Troy to avenge the rape of Helen but never suffers the least pang of jealousy against Paris who is enjoying her. So devoid is Achilles of common humanity, that when Hector wishes to arrange that the victor in the fight shall bury the vanquished, he forgets that they are equals in rank and that death levels all, and savagely answers: "When have men ever made a truce with lions, and when have wolves and lambs had the same wish?" and he adds, "If I slay thee, I will drag thee bound naked to my chariot round the walls of Troy three days" (as he actually did in the sequel) and finally, "I will give thee to my hounds to devour." And he would have carried out his threat, had not the unhappy father Priam come to him to ransom the corpse. But even in this deeply-moving interview, when he has received Priam in his tent after the latter has, escorted by Mercury, passed alone through the midst of the Greek camp, when he has welcomed him to his table, at a single involuntary word that falls from the lips of the unhappy old man as he bewails the loss of so valiant a son Achilles forgets the sacred law of hospitality; and, ignoring the full and complete trust which Priam had placed in him, untouched by the terrible misfortunes of such a king, by the respect due to a father and the veneration due to so old a man, without reflecting on the reversal of his fortunes, of all things the most apt to excite pity, flies into a bestial rage and shouts a threat that he "will cut off his head"! Death itself does not end his anger at the loss of Briseis, were it not that the beautiful and unhappy princess Polyxena, daughter of the once rich and powerful Priam and now a wretched slave, is sacrificed on his tomb, that the shade glutted with revenge may drink the last drop of her innocent blood; and in the lower world, when Ulysses asks him what state he prefers, Achilles answers that he "would rather be the commonest slave, but alive"! Such is the hero whom Homer adorns with the permanent epithet of "without reproach" (ἀμύμων) and celebrates in the hearing of Greece as a pattern of heroic virtue. Such a hero, whose reasoning powers are concentrated in his spear-point, can only be classed with those self-satisfied persons