lone and fought in the crowd of Trojans, like two wild
boars that a circle of hunters surrounds with spears, so fiercely they
stood at bay. There they would both have fallen, but Idomeneus, and
Meriones of Crete, and Thrasymedes, Nestor's son, ran to their rescue,
and fiercer grew the fighting. Eurypylus desired to slay Agamemnon and
Menelaus, and end the war, but, as the spears of the Scots encompassed
King James at Flodden Field till he ran forward, and fell within a
lance's length of the English general, so the men of Crete and Pylos
guarded the two princes with their spears.

There Paris was wounded in the thigh with a spear, and he retreated a
little way, and showered his arrows among the Greeks; and Idomeneus
lifted and hurled a great stone at Eurypylus which struck his spear out
of his hand, and he went back to find it, and Menelaus and Agamemnon had
a breathing space in the battle. But soon Eurypylus returned, crying on
his men, and they drove back foot by foot the ring of spears round
Agamemnon, and Aeneas and Paris slew men of Crete and of Mycenae till the
Greeks were pushed to the ditch round the camp; and then great stones and
spears and arrows rained down on the Trojans and the people of Eurypylus
from the battlements and towers of the Grecian wall. Now night fell, and
Eurypylus knew that he could not win the wall in the dark, so he withdrew
his men, and they built great fires, and camped upon the plain.

The case of the Greeks was now like that of the Trojans after the death
of Hector. They buried Machaon and the other chiefs who had fallen, and
they remained within their ditch and their wall, for they dared not come
out into the open plain. They knew not whether Ulysses and Diomede had
come safely to Scyros, or whether their ship had been wrecked or driven
into unknown seas. So they sent a herald to Eurypylus, asking for a
truce, that they might gather their dead and burn them, and the Trojans
and Khita also buried their dead.

Meanwhile the swift ship of Ulysses had swept through the sea to Scyros,
and to the palace of King Lycomedes. There they found Neoptolemus, the
son of Achilles, in the court before the doors. He was as tall as his
father, and very like him in face and shape, and he was practising the
throwing of the spear at a mark. Right glad were Ulysses and Diomede to
behold him, and Ulysses told Neoptolemus who they were, and why they
came, and implored him to take pity on the Greeks