s obliged to go to Lesbos, where he was
purified from the act of homicide by Odysseus.

Next arrived Memnon, son of Tithonus and Eos, the most stately of living
men, with a powerful band of black Ethiopians, to the assistance of
Troy. Sallying forth against the Greeks, he made great havoc among them:
the brave and popular Antilochus perished by his hand, a victim to
filial devotion in defence of Nestor. Achilles at length attacked him,
and for a long time the combat was doubtful between them: the prowess of
Achilles and the supplication of Thetis with Zeus finally prevailed;
while Eos obtained for her vanquished son the consoling gift of
immortality. His tomb, however, was shown near the Propontis, within a
few miles of the mouth of the river AEsopus, and was visited annually by
the birds called Memnonides, who swept it and bedewed it with water from
the stream. So the traveller Pausanias was told, even in the second
century after the Christian era, by the Hellespontine Greeks.

But the fate of Achilles himself was now at hand. After routing the
Trojans and chasing them into the town, he was slain near the Scaean gate
by an arrow from the quiver of Paris, directed under the unerring
auspices of Apollo. The greatest efforts were made by the Trojans to
possess themselves of the body, which was, however, rescued and borne
off to the Grecian camp by the valor of Ajax and Odysseus. Bitter was
the grief of Thetis for the loss of her son; she came into the camp with
the Muses and the Nereids to mourn over him; and when a magnificent
funeral-pile had been prepared by the Greeks to burn him with every mark
of honor, she stole away the body and conveyed it to a renewed and
immortal life in the island of Leuce in the Euxine Sea. According to
some accounts he was there blest with the nuptials and company of Helen.

Thetis celebrated splendid funeral games in honor of her son, and
offered the unrivalled panoply which Hephaestus had forged and wrought
for him as a prize to the most distinguished warrior in the Grecian
army. Odysseus and Ajax became rivals for the distinction, when Athene,
together with some Trojan prisoners, who were asked from which of the
two their country had sustained greatest injury, decided in favor of the
former. The gallant Ajax lost his senses with grief and humiliation: in
a fit of frenzy he slew some sheep, mistaking them for the men who had
wronged him, and then fell upon his own sword.

Odysseus now l