inning his way by playing on the Trojans’ noble compassion and sense of justice for a man whom they think grievously misused. The guilefulness, which Homer portrayed so humanly and attractively in Odysseus, has become sinister, bestial, and alien to decency and truth. Sinon is the corruption of one heroic type, the clever soldier as a later, disillusioned age saw him. Equally unattractive is the type of relentless fighter, as Vergilius presents it in Neoptolemus. The son of Achilles inherits his father’s proud temper and martial fury, but he is brutal and bloodthirsty. He is compared to a poisonous snake, and with remorseless cruelty, he kills the boy Polites in from of his old father, Priam, and then kills Priam himself. The hideous horror of such a death is conveyed in Vergilius’ words: “His tall body was left lying headless on the shore, and by it the head hacked from his shoulders: a corpse without a name” (II, 557-58). The hateful brutality of the Greeks increases the helpless appeal of the Trojans, of Cassandra dragged by the hair from the sanctuary of Pallas, of Hecuba and her daughters clustering like frightened doves about the sacred hearth, of Priam girding on his useless sword and throwing his pathetic, ineffectual spear at Neoptolemus. In such a fight, it is the best that perish, like Rhipeus: “He, the most just of all the Trojans, who never wavered from the right; yet the gods regarded not his righteousness” (II, 426-28). Such a victory has no glamour and no glory. It is won by treachery and cruelty. To this Homer’s Achaeans have degenerated. The criticism of the heroic type, which Vergilius gives in his Sack of Troy, is not his only approach to it. It shows one side of the question as he saw it, but only one side. As clear to him, as to others, that an ideal had in its time exerted so great an influence on the world, could not be entirely like this, though at ti...
