Easily one from the other when all get mixed o’er the pasture,
So did the chieftains rank them here there in their places for onslaught,
Hard on the push of the fray; and among them King Agamemnon,
He, for his eyes and his head, as when Zeus glows glad in his thunder,
He with the girdle of Ares, he with the breast of Poseidon.
Poem: Agamemnon In The Fight
[Iliad, B. XI. V. 148]
These, then, he left, and away where ranks were now
clashing the thickest,
Onward rushed, and with him rushed all of the bright-greaved
Achaians.
Foot then footmen slew, that were flying from direful
compulsion,
Horse at the horsemen (up from off under them mounted
the dust-cloud,
Up off the plain, raised up cloud-thick by the thundering
horse-hooves)
Hewed with the sword’s sharp edge; and so meanwhile
Lord Agamemnon
Followed, chasing and slaughtering aye, on-urgeing
the Argives.
Now, as when fire voracious catches the unclipped
woodland,
This way bears it and that the great whirl of the
wind, and the scrubwood
Stretches uptorn, flung forward alength by the fire’s
fury rageing,
So beneath Atreides Agamemnon heads of the scattered
Trojans fell; and in numbers amany the horses, neck-stiffened,
Rattled their vacant cars down the roadway gaps of
the war-field,
Missing the blameless charioteers, but, for these,
they were outstretched
Flat upon earth, far dearer to vultures than to their
home-mates.
Poem: Paris And Diomedes
[Iliad; B. XI V. 378]
So he, with a clear shout of laughter,
Forth of his ambush leapt, and he vaunted him, uttering
thiswise:
“Hit thou art! not in vain flew the shaft; how
by rights it had pierced thee
Into the undermost gut, therewith to have rived thee
of life-breath!
Following that had the Trojans plucked a new breath
from their direst,
They all frighted of thee, as the goats bleat in flight
from a lion.”
Then unto him untroubled made answer stout Diomedes:
“Bow-puller, jiber, thy bow for thy glorying,
spyer at virgins!
If that thou dared’st face me here out in the
open with weapons,
Nothing then would avail thee thy bow and thy thick
shot of arrows.
Now thou plumest thee vainly because of a graze of
my footsole;
Reck I as were that stroke from a woman or some pettish
infant.
Aye flies blunted the dart of the man that’s
emasculate, noughtworth!
Otherwise hits, forth flying from me, and but strikes
it the slightest,
My keen shaft, and it numbers a man of the dead fallen
straightway.
Torn, troth, then are the cheeks of the wife of that
man fallen slaughtered,
Orphans his babes, full surely he reddens the earth
with his blood-drops,
Rotting, round him the birds, more numerous they than
the women.”