Achilles is tempted to attack Agamemnon, but Athena restrains him. He swears to retire to his tent. Old Nestor tries to make peace.
Athena is sent by Hera to hold Achilles back. She appears to him, but in line 198:
των δ` αλλων ου τις ορατο – not one of the others saw her
It’s an interesting feature of the gods’ manifestations; they only appear to one person at a time (as far as I have been able to notice). A subtle comment on divinity and belief.
Vocabulary is tough. As noted before, uncommon words abound. The Chicago Homer is an invaluable resource, offering interlinear versions of Homer’s work, a grammatical lookup for word forms, a lookup for other occurrences of a word, and word count. So far, it seems that most lines of the Iliad include 2 or 3 words that are occur less than ten times each.
Today’s word is ερητυω – to check, hold back, or restrain. Greek synonyms include ερυκω, ισχω, and εχω. By the way, I am dispensing with accents, breathing indicators, and iota subscripts. This blog is not an academic exercise; I can’t figure out how to make some of them on my Linux system, and they would take that much longer. The smooth and rough breathing indicators can be quite useful to English speakers, as a rough breathing mark essentially indicates an “H” sound. Thus ηλιος, written