the enemy, should he offer to attack them, and placing their hopes chiefly in time and in extraordinary accidents of fortune; as to themselves, they felt incapable of doing any thing for their own deliverance; mere confusion and terror and ill-boding reports possessed the whole city; till at last a thing happened not unlike what we so often find represented, without, however, being accepted as true by people in general, in Homer. On some great and unusual occasion we find him say:—
But him the blue-eyed goddess did inspire;
and elsewhere:—
But some immortal turned my mind away,
To think what others of the deed would say;
and again:—
Were 't his own thought or were 't a god's command.
People are apt, in such passages, to censure and disregard the poet, as if, by the introduction of mere impossibilities and idle fictions, he were denying the action of a man's own deliberate thought and free choice; which is not, in the least, the case in Homer's representation, where the ordinary, probable, and habitual conclusions that common reason leads to are continually ascribed to our own direct agency. He certainly says frequently enough:—
But I consulted with my own great soul;
or, as in another passage:—
He spoke. Achilles, with quick pain possessed,
Revolved two purposes in his strong breast;
and in a third:—
—Yet never to her wishes won
The just mind of the brave Bellerophon.
