Cox, George - Aryan Mythology Vol 2.pdf

04 MYTHOLOGY OF THE ARYAN NATIONS.
BOOK him, while almost all the booty went to them. It is the
_—^—* servitude of Phoibos : but the despot is here a harsher
master than Admetos, and the grief which Achilleus is
made to suffer is deeper than that of Apollon when Daphne
vanishes from his sight, or of Herakles when Eurytos refuses
to perform the compact which pledged him to make lole the
bride of the hero. The Achaian camp is visited with a
terrible plague. First the beasts die, then the men, and the
smoke of funeral pyres ascends up everywhere to heaven. At
length they learn from Kalchas that the wrath of Phoibos
has been roused by the wrong done to the priest Chryses
who had in vain offered to Agamemnon a splendid ransom
for his daughter, and that not until the maiden is given up
will the hand of the god cease to lie heavy on the people.
At length the king is brought to submit to the will of the
deity, but he declares that in place of the daughter of
Chryses, Briseis, the child of the Vedic Brisaya, shall be torn
away from the tents of Achilleus, and thus the maiden on
whom Achilleus had lavished all his love passes away into the
hands of the man whom he utterly despises for his cowardice
and his greed. For him the light is blotted out of the sky
as thoroughly as the first beauty of the day is gone when the
fair hues of morning give way before the more monotonous
tints which take their place. Henceforth his journey must
be solitary, but he can take that vengeance on his persecutor
which the sun may exact of those who have deprived him of
his treasure. He may hide himself in his tent, or sullenly
sit on the sea- shore, as the sun may veil his face behind the
clouds, while the battle of the winds goes on beneath them.
Then, in the sudden outburst of his grief, he makes a solemn
vow that when the Achaians are smitten down by their enemies
his sword shall not be unsheathed in their behalf; and when
his mother comes from her coral caves to comfort him, he
beseeches her to go to Zeus and pray him to turn the scale
of victory on the Trojan side, that the Argives may see what
sort of a king they have, and Agamemnon may rue the folly
which dishonoured the best and bravest of all the Achaian
chieftains. So Thetis hastens to Olympos, and Zeus swears
to her that Ilion shall not fall until the insult done to her