The Iliad of Homer

by Homer

Like the swarms of clustering bees that issue forever in fresh bursts from the hollow in the stone, and hang like bunched grapes as they hover beneath the flowers in springtime 90 fluttering in swarms together this way and that way, so the many nations of men from the ships and the shelters along the front of the deep sea beach marched in order by companies to the assembly, and Rumor walked blazing among them, Zeus’ messenger, to hasten them along.

Philoktetes skilled in the bow’s work,

Yet he himself lay apart in the island, suffering strong pains, in Lemnos the sacrosanct, where the sons of the Achaians had left him in agony from the sore bite of the wicked water snake. There he lay apart in his pain;

Nastes came like a girl to the fighting in golden raiment, poor fool, nor did this avail to keep dismal death back; but he went down under the hands of swift-running Aiakides 875 in the river, and fiery Achilleus stripped the gold from him. Sarpedon with unfaulted Glaukos was lord of the Lykians from Lykia far away, and the whirling waters of Xanthos.

felly

And across her shoulders she threw the betasseled, terrible aegis, all about which Terror hangs like a garland, 740 and Hatred is there, and Battle Strength, and heart-freezing Onslaught and thereon is set the head of the grim gigantic Gorgon, a thing of fear and horror, portent of Zeus of the aegis.

when out of the thunderhead the air shows darkening 865 after a day’s heat when the stormy wind uprises,

145 “High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation? As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another 150 dies.

Behold the terms that I make, let Zeus be witness upon them. If with the thin edge of the bronze he takes my life, then let him strip my armor and carry it back to the hollow ships, but give my body to be taken home again, so that the Trojans 80 and the wives of the Trojans may give me in death my rite of burning.

while others 475 paid slaves taken in war;

Kastianeira, 305 Priam’s bride from Aisyme, with the form of a goddess.

single-foot horses

Yet with Hera I am not so angry, neither indignant, since it is ever her way to cross the commands that I give her.”

will speak in the way it seems best to my mind, and no one shall have in his mind any thought that is better than this one 105 that I have in my mind either now or long before now ever since that day, illustrious, when you went from the shelter of angered Achilleus, taking by force the girl Briseis against the will of the rest of us, since I for my part urged you strongly not to, but you, giving way to your proud heart’s 110 anger, dishonored a great man, one whom the immortals

honor, since you have taken his prize and keep it.

I will give him these, and with them shall go the one I took from him, the daughter of Briseus. And to all this I will swear a great oath that I never entered into her bed and never lay with her as is natural for human people, between men and women.

For as I detest the doorways of Death, I detest that man, who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks forth another.

Fate is the same for the man who holds back, the same if he fights hard. We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.

A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.

Yet why must the Argives fight with the Trojans? And why was it the son of Atreus assembled and led here these people?

but a man’s life cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier.

with the soft bondage of slumber upon them;

from his hand. Then

“Son of Peleus, I will no longer run from you, as before this I fled three times around the great city of Priam, and dared not stand to your onfall. But now my spirit in turn has driven me to stand and face you. I must take you now, or I must be taken.

the throat, where death of the soul comes most swiftly; in this place brilliant Achilleus drove the spear as he came on in fury, and clean through the soft part of the neck the spearpoint was driven.