Iliad by Homer - Join iZDOT

Homer’s Iliad
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 setting 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 escape 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 vouchsafed 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 Trojans and fought more boldly.
There was no man of all the many Danaans who could then boast
that he had driven his horses over the trench and gone forth to fight
sooner than the son of Tydeus; long before any one else could do
so he slew an armed warrior of the Trojans, Agelaus the son of
Phradmon. He had turned his horses in flight, but the spear struck
him in the back midway between his shoulders and went right
through his chest, and his armour rang rattling round him as he fell
forward from his chariot.
148