placable to mailed foes, he is generous and even tender to weeping Priam: he knows that he bears a doomed life if he tarries on Trojan ground, yet though highly provoked by Agamemnon, he abides constant to the oath he had taken as one of the suitors of Helen. But the Achilles of the "Iphigenia," although a peerless soldier, the Paladin of the Achæan host—a Greek Bayard, "sans peur et sans reproche"—is a modest, nay, even a shy stripling, blushing like a girl when he comes suddenly into the presence of his destined bride and her mother: not easily moved, yet perplexed and indignant in the extreme when he discovers that his name has been used as a lure, and full of pity for, and prompt to aid, the unhappy victims of a cruel and unnatural plot, Achilles, indeed, in the hands of Euripides, is an anticipation of the Knight in the Canterbury Tales:—
"And though that he was worthy, he was wys:
And of his port as meke as is a mayde:
He never yit no vilonye ne sayde,
In al his lyf unto no manner wight:
He was a verry perfit gentil knight."
No chance of extricating himself from the dreadful consequences of his summons to Clytemnestra remains for Agamemnon, except the very slender one of persuading her to return alone to Argos. This she stoutly, and, in her ignorance of his secret motive, reasonably refuses to do. A sharp connubial encounter ensues, in which Agamemnon does not get the best of it. A
