Page 148 - the-iliad

was middlemost of all; it was from this place that his voice
would carry farthest, on the one hand towards the tents
of Ajax son of Telamon, and on the other towards those of
Achilles—for these two heroes, well assured of their own
strength, had valorously drawn up their ships at the two
ends of the line. From this spot then, with a voice that could
be heard afar, he shouted to the Danaans, saying, ‘Argives,
shame on you cowardly creatures, brave in semblance only;
where are now our vaunts that we should prove victorious—
the vaunts we made so vaingloriously in Lemnos, when we
ate the flesh of horned cattle and filled our mixing-bowls
to the brim? You vowed that you would each of you stand
against a hundred or two hundred men, and now you prove
no match even for one—for Hector, who will be ere long set-
ting our ships in a blaze. Father Jove, did you ever so ruin
a great king and rob him so utterly of his greatness? Yet,
when to my sorrow I was coming hither, I never let my ship
pass your altars without offering the fat and thigh-bones of
heifers upon every one of them, so eager was I to sack the
city of Troy. Vouchsafe me then this prayer—suffer us to es-
cape at any rate with our lives, and let not the Achaeans be
so utterly vanquished by the Trojans.’
Thus did he pray, and father Jove pitying his tears vouch-
safed him that his people should live, not die; forthwith he
sent them an eagle, most unfailingly portentous of all birds,
with a young fawn in its talons; the eagle dropped the fawn
by the altar on which the Achaeans sacrificed to Jove the
lord of omens; when, therefore, the people saw that the bird
had come from Jove, they sprang more fiercely upon the

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