"Such speed made these men, and on foot ran thrice about the walls."
-Homer, The Iliad IN Chapman's Homer (Ware, Hertfordshire, 2002), Book Twenty-Two, line 141.
Achilles drags Hector's dead body:
"She cast her greedy eyes, and saw her Hector slain, and bound
"T' Achilles chariot, manlessly dragg'd to the Grecian fleet." (lines 444-445)
Stirling's account:
"'...he went berserk - slew the enemy commander and dragged his body around... His father called him Ach... Akhil... too much wine, I can't pronounce the damned thing, one of those -eus names.'"
-SM Stirling, On The Oceans Of Eternity (New York, 2000), Chapter Eleven, pp. 231-232.
Other details confirm that Stirling's berserker is the Homeric hero.
"Once upon a time there was a king who set himself above the foreign merchants...Harry Stenvik and I hung him by the seat of his trousers from his tallest minaret, in sight of all the people, and the name of the Polesotechnic League was great in the land. Then we made inroads on the stock-in-trade of the Solar Spice & Liquors factor..."
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 275.
"'There was that Javanese chief who decided he could hassle the wimpy foreign traders...We strung up the hijo de puta by the ass-end of his own loincloth, from the gateway in the palisade 'round his village, left him yelling and screeching to the crowd, and the had quite a party...'"
-Stirling, op. cit., p. 241.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I thought of Achilles when I read that bit from ON THE OCEANS OF ETERNITY. (Smiles)
Ha! I immediately recognized how Andersonian that bit about the Javanese chief was! Taken from "The Master Key."
Sean
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