In The Iliad, Book IX is known as the "Embassy" section because it involves sending a messenger to talk to Achilleus, who has withdrawn to his tent and who refuses to help his fellow Greeks fight. "Embassy" refers to sending a messenger or delegate to another leader. In this section, there are three speakers and responses to each of those speakers as the issue of whether Achilleus will fight or not is discussed.
At the beginning of this book, the Greeks are completely demoralized and certain that they will lose, so much so that Agamemnon is ready to quit and go home:
Friends, who are leaders of the Argives and keep their counsel:
Zeus son of Kronos has caught me badly in bitter futility (IX.17-18).
The central issue in this book turns on the attitude of Achilleus. He has been smarting from Agamemnon's actions and is a sympathetic figure because it is clear Agamemnon was wrong. Now, however, he rejects the reconciliation offered to him and places his wounded pride above the safety of other Greeks, insisting that he will not join the fight and will take his men and sail home. There is thus a shift here as the delegation seeks reconciliation and is rebuffed.
The three speakers sent to persuade Achilleus are Odysseus, Phoinix, and Aias (Ajax). Odysseus first praises Achilleus, beginning with a toast. His argument is that unless Achilleus helps, he fears that the Greeks will die far from home on foreign land:
Up then! if yo are minded, late though it be, to rescue
the afflicted sons of the Achaians from the Trojan onslaught (IX.247-248).
Odysseus, always referred to as the "godlike Odysseus," is the individual closest in stature to Achilleus, and it is he who expresses the reason for the visit as he expresses his own fears at what the Trojans might do and at the way the Greeks have been losing the fight:
All this I fear terribly in my heart, lest immortals
accomplish all these threats, and lest for u...