In xvi. 83-86, to copy Grote's paraphrase, Achilles says to Patroclus, "Obey my words, so that you may procure for me honour and glory _from the body of the Greeks_, and that they may send back to me the damsel, giving me ample presents besides...." Grote has oddly misunderstood the whole story. He says, "The ninth Book _has actually_ tendered to Achilles everything he demands and even more." Now Achilles had demanded only the massacre of the Greeks at the ships, and then recognition of what kind of king they have. In what passage does Achilles demand anything else? In none till, in Book xvi. 84, 85, he bids Patroclus fight, when he himself will receive Briseis and fair gifts: his revenge he has already enjoyed, but Phoenix had warned him that he would be dishonoured if he fought without receiving atonement. Grote, in the spirit of his school, rejects later allusions to the offered atonement of Book ix. as interpolations thrust in for the sake of restoring harmony. Yet the cunning interpolators allowed the Great Discrepancy to stand! If we may reject whatever lines destroy our theory, criticism is an idle game of contradictory conjectures, each inquirer discerning interpolations in all passages that ruin his favourite hypothesis. After all Grote concludes, "The poem consists of a part original and other parts superadded; yet it is certainly not impossible that the author of the former may himself have composed the latter." If so, "the poet ... has not thought fit to recast the parts and events in such manner as to impart to the whole a pervading thread of _consensus_ and organisation such as we see in the _Odyssey_."[25] Thus the poet did not mind a ghastly discrepancy. I trust that all who have not invincible prepossessions will see that Book ix. is not only consistent with Books xi. and xvi., but is the very _clou_ of the _Iliad_, without which Achilles is not himself, and the _Achilleid_ would have been a purposeless tragedy. This opinion is not based on aesthetic and literary criticism alone, but on the actual ideas about allegiance, the wrongs done by the Over Lord, the rights of the injured vassal, and the rules concerning atonement which pervade the _Iliad_. As in all such early societies, a man was dishonoured if he forgave a wrong without receiving atonement; and was blamed if, like Achilles, he refused atonement when it was offered with due ceremonial. Even if students, under the suggestion of Grote, fail to accept my view that Book ix. is no discrepancy, but contains the central moment, and, as Phoenix's words in that Book prove, the _motif_ of the tragedy of Achilles--"he who refuses the prayers of the penitent may fall and pay the price" (ix. 512), I trust that, at least, I have proved that the discrepancy is not "flagrant" and "crying," and an infallible proof of late interpolation.