Page:The Odyssey of Homer, with the Hymns, Epigrams, and Battle of the Frogs and Mice (Buckley 1853).djvu/72

36 ing some where else amongst men; and did he, having taken courage, slay him?"

Then the Gerenian knight Nestor answered him: "I will indeed then tell thee all things true, my son; for thou thyself dost suspect this, as it in truth happened. If auburn-haired Menelaus, son of Atreus, coming from Troy had found Ægisthus alive in the palace; he would not have poured upon him when dead the crumbled earth, but certainly dogs and birds would have eaten him lying on the plain far from Argos; nor would any one of the Grecian women have mourned him; for he devised a very heinous deed. For we sat there accomplishing many labours; but he at leisure in the recess of horse-pasturing Argos soothed the wife of Agamemnon very much with words; the divine Clytemnestra herself indeed before refused the disgraceful deed, for she possessed a good understanding: for there was with her a man, a bard, to whom the son of Atreus, when he set out to Troy, gave earnest charge to preserve his wife. But when the Fate of the gods bound her that she should be subdued, then leading the bard to a desert island, he left him to become a spoil and prey for birds; but he willing led her willing to his own home. And he burnt many thighs on the sacred altars of the gods, and suspended many ornaments and tapestry, and gold, after he had accomplished the heinous deed, which he had never expected in his mind. Now we indeed setting out from Troy sailed together, the son of Atreus and myself, having a friendly disposition towards one another: but when we came to sacred Sunium, the promontory of Athens, there Phœbus Apollo, coming against him with his soft darts, slew the pilot of Menelaus, while holding in his hands the rudder of the ship as it went along, Phrontis, son of Onetor, who surpassed the tribes of men in steering a ship, when tempests pressed upon it. Thus he, although hastening on