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30 as for his

He can clothe this counsel, too, in winning words. The stream of eloquence that flowed from his lips, says the poet, was “sweeter than honey.” He gently reproves both disputants for their unseemly strife—a shame to the Greeks, a triumph to the enemy. His words ring like the lament of David over the suicide of Saul—“Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.”

He proceeds to tell them something of his own long experience, by way of claim on their attention—with something also, as critics have noticed, of an old man’s garrulity. But the reader, it should be remembered, really wants to know something about him, even if the Greeks may have been supposed to have heard his story before.