the contest with me, you will see the halter placed about his neck’. And
Kamus: ‘on the summit of the mountain tomorrow you will see a mound of
dead Iranian warriors’.^85 The ‘you will see’ idiom is found also in the Iliad,
when Agamemnon reproaches Menestheus and Odysseus for apparently
hanging back from the battle line, and Odysseus retorts angrily, ‘you will see,
if you care to, the father of Telemachus mixing with the front line of the
Trojans’, whereupon Agamemnon soothes him and apologizes (4. 336–63).
There is a very similar encounter in MBh. 5. 73–5. Kes ́ava goads Bhı ̄ma
with insinuations of cowardice, and the hero replies indignantly, saying ‘you
shall, when the crowded battle goes on, on the day of bloodshed, see the
elephant and chariot drivers annihilated! You and all the world shall see
me furiously finishing off brave bulls of the barons, pulling away the best of
the best!’
Night is in general the time for sleeping and a break in the action. But
more than once in the Iliad we find the motif that ‘everyone else was
asleep, but X did not sleep: he pondered in his heart.. .’ (2. 1, 10. 1, 24. 677).
It is a mechanism for introducing a new initiative into the action. In Book 10
it leads to a night raid on the Trojan allies’ camp by two heroes, Odysseus
and Diomedes. There is a remarkable parallel in the tenth book of the
Maha ̄bha ̄rata, the Sauptikaparvan. Night comes, others sleep,
But Dron
̇
a’s son, O Bha ̄rata, overpowered
by shame and wrath, could not sleep...The man in question, As ́vattha ̄man, conceives a night attack to massacre
the sleeping enemy, wakes his companions, and debates the plan with
them (MBh. 10. 1. 32ff., trs. Johnson). Objections are raised, but he will
not be put off, and he sets out with two other heroes. They enter the enemy
camp, cause havoc and slaughter, and return safely. The theme of a night
attack in which enemy chieftains are killed in their sleep recurs in a lying
story in the Ra ̄ma ̄yan
̇
a (6. 22. 18–34). The initial situation of the single
wakeful ponderer is paralleled in an Eddic fragment (Brot af Sigurðarkviðu
12):
All of them slept when they came to their beds:
only Gunnar was awake, longer than all...However, he is reflecting on something that has happened, not on a plan for
action.
(^85) Levy (1967), 77, 133.
- Arms and the Man 475