Note 267 — APPENDIX
Reading edition
Among the Mexicans, prisoners, rather than domestics and attendants, were devoted to death at the obsequies of the great, as victims to that spirit of revenge so deeply cherished by savage or barbarous nations. So even Achilles, lamenting over the body of Patroclus, says,
Ere thy dear relics in the grave are laid, Shall Hector’s head be offer’d to thy shade; That, with his arms, shall hang before thy shrine; And twelve the noblest of the Trojan line, Sacred to vengeance, by this hand expire: Their lives effus’d around thy flaming pyre. Pope’s Iliad, Book XVIII. lines 391–396.—Nuttall.