the ships, and striking with swords and axes. Hector had a lighted torch
and tried to set fire to the ship of Aias; but Aias kept him back with
the long spear, and slew a Trojan, whose lighted torch fell from his
hand. And Aias kept shouting: "Come on, and drive away Hector; it is not
to a dance that he is calling his men, but to battle."

The dead fell in heaps, and the living ran over them to mount the heaps
of slain and climb the ships. Hector rushed forward like a sea wave
against a great steep rock, but like the rock stood the Greeks; still the
Trojans charged past the beaks of the foremost ships, while Aias,
thrusting with a spear more than twenty feet long, leaped from deck to
deck like a man that drives four horses abreast, and leaps from the back
of one to the back of another. Hector seized with his hand the stern of
the ship of Protesilaus, the prince whom Paris shot when he leaped ashore
on the day when the Greeks first landed; and Hector kept calling: "Bring
fire!" and even Aias, in this strange sea fight on land, left the decks
and went below, thrusting with his spear through the portholes. Twelve
men lay dead who had brought fire against the ship which Aias guarded.




THE SLAYING AND AVENGING OF PATROCLUS


At this moment, when torches were blazing round the ships, and all seemed
lost, Patroclus came out of the hut of Eurypylus, whose wound he had been
tending, and he saw that the Greeks were in great danger, and ran weeping
to Achilles. "Why do you weep," said Achilles, "like a little girl that
runs by her mother's side, and plucks at her gown and looks at her with