ἐποχήσεται
This verb is likewise used (in its only other appearance in our texts) at Iliad 17.449, when Zeus will not allow Hektor to take Achilles’ horses after he kills Patroklos, whom the horses mourn nearby. A telling cross-reference can be made, then, with this resonant verb: Hektor promises to Dolon that no one else will take Achilles’ horses, and in Book 17 it is Hektor himself who is prohibited from doing so by Zeus. Within the larger tradition, this verb may be part of a traditional vocabulary about Achilles’ horses and may therefore evoke for a traditional audience the embedded knowledge that Achilles will never lose his horses to his enemies. (See also below at 10.402–404.) At Iliad 17.75–78, Apollo actively dissuades Hektor from going after the horses. Disguised as Mentes, Apollo tells Hektor that he runs in pursuit of something unattainable (Ἕκτορ νῦν σὺ μὲν ὧδε θέεις ἀκίχητα διώκων). In both of these cases, it is a god who forbids the theft from happening, and Zeus recalls there how it was the gods who gave the horses to Peleus. That the horses were originally a wedding gift to Peleus from the gods may account for why Achilles’ horses are not subject to the same vagaries of warfare as, say, Rhesos’ horses are. Deep familiarity with this vocabulary would also shape the audience’s reception of the request by Dolon and promise by Hektor.