Iliad by Homer - Join iZDOT

Homer’s Iliad
defending the city and the Curetes trying to destroy it. For Diana of
the golden throne was angry and did them hurt because Oeneus
had not offered her his harvest first-fruits. The other gods had all
been feasted with hecatombs, but to the daughter of great Jove
alone he had made no sacrifice. He had forgotten her, or somehow
or other it had escaped him, and this was a grievous sin. Thereon
the archer goddess in her displeasure sent a prodigious creature
against him- a savage wild boar with great white tusks that did
much harm to his orchard lands, uprooting apple-trees in full
bloom and throwing them to the ground. But Meleager son of
Oeneus got huntsmen and hounds from many cities and killed itfor
it was so monstrous that not a few were needed, and many a
man did it stretch upon his funeral pyre. On this the goddess set
the Curetes and the Aetolians fighting furiously about the head and
skin of the boar.
“So long as Meleager was in the field things went badly with the
Curetes, and for all their numbers they could not hold their ground
under the city walls; but in the course of time Meleager was
angered as even a wise man will sometimes be. He was incensed
with his mother Althaea, and therefore stayed at home with his
wedded wife fair Cleopatra, who was daughter of Marpessa
daughter of Euenus, and of Ides the man then living. He it was who
took his bow and faced King Apollo himself for fair Marpessa’s
sake; her father and mother then named her Alcyone, because her
mother had mourned with the plaintive strains of the halcyon-bird
when Phoebus Apollo had carried her off. Meleager, then, stayed at
home with Cleopatra, nursing the anger which he felt by reason of
his mother’s curses. His mother, grieving for the death of her
brother, prayed the gods, and beat the earth with her hands, calling
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