188 HISTORY OF GREECE. Greeks should begin to fortify at this juncture, and that the pot who discovered the gap might not be enabled to fill it up with success. As the Greeks have got on, up to this moment, without the wall, and as we have heard nothing but tales of their success, why should they now think farther laborious precautions for security necessary ? We will not ask, why the Trojans should sfcind quietly by and permit a wall to be built, since the truce was concluded expressly for bury ing the dead. 1 1 0. Miiller (Hist. Greek Literat. ch. v. 6) says, about this wall : "Nor is it until the Greeks are taught by the experience of the first day's fighting, that the Trojans can resist them in open battle, that the Greeks build the wall round their ships This appeared to Thucydides so little conformable to historical probability, that, without regard to the authority of Homer, lie placed the building of these walls immediately after the landing." It is to be lamented, I think, that Thucydides took upon him to determine the point at all as a matter of history ; but when he once undertook this, the account in the Iliad was not of a nature to give him much satisfaction, nor does the reason assigned by Miiller make it better. It is implied in Miiller's i-eason that, before the first day's battle, the Greeks did not believe that the Trojans could resist them in open battle: the Trojans (according to him) never had maintained the field, so long as Achilles was up and fighting on the Grecian side, and therefore the Greeks were quite astonished to find now, for the first time, that they could do so. Now nothing can be more at variance with the tenor of the second and following books than this supposition. The Trojans come forth readily and fight gallantly; neither Agamemnon, nor Nestor, nor Odysseus consider them as enemies who cannot hold front; and the circuit of exhortation by Agamemnon (Epipolesis), so strikingly described in the fourth book, proves that he does not anticipate a very easy victory. Nor does Nestor, in pro- posing the construction of the wall, give the smallest hint that the power of the Trojans to resist in the open field was to the Greeks an unexpected discovery. The reason assigned by Muller, then, is a fancy of his own, proceeding from the same source of mistake as others among his remarks ; because ho tries to find, in the books between the first and eighth, a governing reference to Achilles (the point of view of the Achilleis), which those books distinctly refuse. The Achilleis was a poem of Grecian disasters up to the time when Achilles sent forth Patroclus ; and during those disasters, it might suit tho poet to refer by contrast to the past time when Achilles was active, and to say that then the Trojans did not dare even to present themselves in battle- array in the field, whereas now they were assailing the ships. But the author of books ii. to vii. has no wish to glorify Achilles : he gives us a picture of the Trojan war generally, and describes the Trojans, not only as brave and equal enemies, but well known by the Greeks themselves to bj so.
