IN LITERATURE
and the sea-eagle. Sometimes, it must be confessed, the concession is more startling than the original transformation. When Hera and Athena came to the plains of Troy to aid the Greeks, we are told that "the goddesses went their way" into battle "with step like unto turtle-doves." The explanation is that as attendants on Zeus, the goddesses had originally been imagined in the form of his sacred doves. The most helpful example, however, of the Homeric expurgation is the story of Dolon, in the tenth book of the Iliad, When Dolon set out to spy on the Greeks, he "cast on his shoulders his crooked bow, and put on thereover the skin of a grey wolf, and on his head a helm of ferret-skin, and took a sharp javelin, and went on his way to the ships." In the Iliad that grey wolf-skin is only a garment. But in the Rhesus of Euripides, which appears
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