ANGER OF ACHILLES. 297 year instead of ten. But it seems that the ten years' duration was so capital a feature in the ancient tale, that no critic ventured to meddle with it. A period of comparative intermission however was now at hand for the Trojans. The gods brought about the memorable fit of anger of Achilles, under the influence of which he refused to put on his armor, and kept his Myrmidons in camp. Accord- ing to the Cypria, this was the behest of Zeus, who had compas- sion on the Trojans : according to the Iliad, Apollo was the origi- nating cause, 1 from anxiety to avenge the injury which his priest Chryses had endured from Agamemnon. For a considerable time, the combats of the Greeks against Troy were conducted without their best warrior, and severe indeed was the humiliation which they underwent in consequence. How the remaining Gre- cian chiefs vainly strove to make amends for his absence how Hector and the Trojans defeated and drove them to their ships how the actual blaze of the destroying flame, applied by Hec- tor to the ship of Protesilaus, roused up the anxious and sympa- thizing Patroclus, and extorted a reluctant consent from Achil- les, to allow his friend and his followers to go forth and avert the last extremity of ruin how Achilles, when Patroclus had been killed by Hector, forgetting his anger in grief for the death of his friend, reentered the fight, drove the Trojans within their walls with immense slaughter, and satiated his revenge both upon the living and the dead Hector all these events have been chronicled, together with those divine dispensations on which most of them are made to depend, in the immortal verse of the Iliad. Homer breaks off with the burial of Hector, whose body has just been ransomed by the disconsolate Priam ; while the lost poem of Arktinus, entitled the ^Ethiopia, so far as we can judge from the argument still remaining of it, handled only the subse- quent events of the siege. The poem of Quintus Smyrnaeus, com- posed about the fourth century of the Christian aera, seems in its first books to coincide with the JEthiopis, in the subsequent books partly with the Hias Minor of Lesches. 2 1 Homer, Iliad, i. 21. 9 Tychsen, Commentat. de Quinto Smyrnaeo, iii. c. 5-7. Th
