The sacrifice of Polyxena at the tomb of Achilles appears to be peculiar to Arctinus. It would be interesting to know whether or not any Ionian poem was the source of the story of Polyxena as given by Dictys Cretensis. In Dictys, Patroclus moves Achilles to be reconciled to Agamemnon: the army goes into winter quarters, and Trojans and Achaeans meet on friendly terms in the grove of Thymbraean Apollo; Achilles sees Polyxena at a sacrifice, and falls in love with her. Hector offers her as the price of his treason to the Achaeans, which annoys Achilles. At Polyxena's request he later restores the body of Hector to Priam. At a subsequent meeting in Apollo's temple, Paris stabs Achilles to death. After the capture of Troy, Odysseus advises the sacrifice of Polyxena to the ghost of Achilles, but Euripides and later writers make the ghost or voice of Achilles demand her death. In other respects, as to the fate of the Trojan ladies, Dictys follows Arctinus. All this tale deeply affected the mediaeval tale of Troy. Meanwhile, we do not know _why_ in Arctinus, Polyxena was chosen as the _γέρας_, or honourable gift, of the dead Achilles. The idea may only have been that, while surviving leaders received each a damsel, the spirit of the great chief should not be deprived of its reward. No idea can be less Achaean, less Homeric, but it is congenial to the Ionian spirit. The fact of the sacrifice would easily suggest, to still later writers, that in his life days Achilles loved Polyxena, and was loved by her; for Philostratus and Tzetzes aver that heart-broken by the murder of Achilles, she slew herself above his tomb. Thus we see how, in the Ionian epics, and onwards through Stesichorus, the tragedians, the Roman poets, Dictys, and the mediaeval makers, the poetic consciousness played freely round the Homeric data, colouring them with the rainbow hues of changing beliefs and changing tastes. There is at least as wide a gulf between the tastes and ideas of Homer, on one side, and of the Ionians on the other, as between Arctinus, on one hand, and Benoit de Troyes and Boccaccio, on the other. That the Ionian ideas, tastes, rites, and legends, as of Theseus and Palamedes, never were intruded into the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, considering that for so long Homer was "taught, recited, imitated in Ionia,"[38] is an undeniable and amazing fact. How were Ionian hands restrained from touching the substance of the Achaean epics? This is, in the strict sense, a paradox, but the facts are undeniable: the epics were never Ionised. Homer was falsely claimed by Athens as an Ionian poet. Is there some basis of truth in the idea that the Aeolian Homeridae of Chios guarded their own?[39]