When Agamemnon sent his embassy with apologies and offers of atonement to Achilles, in Book ix., the Achaeans had not been punished as Achilles, from the first, expressed his desire to see them smitten. Diomedes had shore in the day of his valour, his _aristeia_; Hector had the worse in his passage-of-arms with Aias; Hera and Athene had abetted the Trojans; and though they camped in the plain, they had not smitten the foe "by the prows of the ships"; nor were they even likely to do so, for the Achaeans had built the wall and dug the trench around the ships. Therefore the demand of Achilles was not yet granted; and though Agamemnon abjectly implored forgiveness and offered the customary atonement, _that_ was not what Achilles wanted. He spurns the gifts, and repeats the whole long story of his wrongs.[16] Agamemnon, he says, _has a ceaseless grudge against him_: the king's submission is merely hypocritical, and Achilles declines to be deceived. "Let him not tempt me, who know him too well; he will not persuade me"[17] "His gifts are hateful to me"; not for ten times these gifts will Achilles be reconciled, till he has glutted his revenge. The long speech of Phoenix[18] partly mollifies him, and, in place of persisting in his intention to sail homewards at once, he tells Aias that he will not fight till Hector comes, slaying the Argives, even to the ships of the Myrmidons.[19] This is an advance even on his demand in Book i. In short, Achilles abides by his determination as announced to his mother in the first Book of the _Iliad_, and goes further. He is consistent. To this resolve, and to his plighted word (for he "hated a liar as the gates of Hades"), Achilles is as constant as the _fond_ of his character--an unexampled tenderness--permitted him to be. This tenderness of the fierce hero who, in grief, cries to his mother like a child; who, in the height of his passion, compares his own labours for the Achaeans to those of "the hen-bird that brings to her unfledged chickens whatsoever morsel she may find, and it goes hard with herself";[20] who likens the suppliant Patroclus to "the little girl that, running beside her mother, and catching at her skirts, cries to be taken up in her arms"; and who gives quarter to fallen foes, distinguishes Achilles. The contrast between this emotion and his pride and later ferocity makes his character; and his chivalry shines out most clearly in his reception of Priam, which is declared to be un-Homeric! The triumph of his fierce pride over his tenderness, when he refuses the gifts in Book ix., is the ἁμάρτημα, the sin or blot on a noble character, which is the keynote, or pivot, of Greek tragedy (as in the _Oedipous Tyrannos_), and of the _Iliad_.