By blaming or insulting his fellow Achaeans for not daring to stand up to the onslaught of Hector, Agamemnon is goading them into action. His insulting words recall a scene that took place in their collective epic past, on the island of Lemnos, where the Achaeans were competitively boasting about the exploits they will perform in the future when they fight in the Trojan War. The idea of ‘boasting’ is conveyed by the noun eukhōlē, which is derived from eukhesthai ‘declare’. As we already saw at I.01.091, what is at stake when an Achaean hero boasts in the Iliad centers on the all-important question: who is the ‘best of the Achaeans’? The noun eukhōlai ‘boastings’ in the plural here at I.08.229 indicates a distributive action: the Achaeans were boasting not as a group but individually and competitively. The object of such competition and dispute would have been: to show who is the aristos ‘best’ of them all. When Agamemnon says at I.08.229 ‘we were saying that we were best [aristoi]’, the plural construction here is distributive in meaning: ‘each one of us was saying that he was the best [aristos]’. We see in this scene of a past event at Lemnos an epic precedent for what is ongoing in the present time of the Trojan War as narrated in the Iliad. Just as there was a dispute at Lemnos, there is a dispute ongoing in the Iliad about that all-important question: who is the ‘best of the Achaeans’? A most relevant detail in the story about the dispute at Lemnos is the fact that the context for the quarreling that took place at that time over the same question, who is the ‘best of the Achaeans’, was a feast where meat was being distributed, I.08.231. So the setting for the quarrel was an event that is elsewhere called a dais, to be defined as ‘feast, division of portions (of meat); sacrifice’ in Homeric diction. As we saw in the comment for I.01.423–425, a dais is a feast where meat is distributed, and this meat comes from the sacrifice of a sacrificial animal. Thus the act of sacrifice converts the feast of humans into a notional feast of the gods. This notion, ‘feast of the gods’, is made explicit in the “micro-Iliad” of O.8.072–083, which is the First Song of Demodokos. At O.08.076, the setting is described this way: θεῶν ἐν δαιτὶ θαλείῃ ‘at a sumptuous feast [dais] of the gods’. So, what is happening at this feast? There is a dispute going on (δηρίσαντο at Ο.08.076), and the dispute is called a neikos ‘quarrel’ at O.08.075. The disputants are Odysseus and Achilles, who are described at O.08.078 as ‘the best of the Achaeans’. In terms of such a dispute in the context of a feast, each one of the two heroes would be claiming to be the ‘best of the Achaeans’. Similarly in the context of the feast at Lemnos as narrated by Agamemnon, each one of the heroes attending would be making such a claim.