With enemies, who while they mutual wage
Proud competition for my mother's love,
My flocks unsparing slaughter, and my beeves.
Now, therefore, whether thou beheld'st, thyself,
Ulysses' death, or at some wand'rer's lips
Hast learn'd it, suppliant at thy knees I beg
The sad recital; for no common woes
Were his allotted portion from the womb.
Neither through pity or o'erstrain'd respect
Flatter me, but explicit all relate

Which thou hast witness'd. If my noble sire
E'er gratified thee by performance just
Of word or deed at Ilium, where ye fell
So num'rous slain in fight, O recollect
Now his fidelity, and tell me true!

Then Menelaus, sighing deep, replied:
Gods! their ambition is to reach the bed
Of a brave man, however base themselves.
But as it chances, when the hart hath laid
Her fawns new-yean'd, and sucklings yet, to rest
Within some dreadful lion's gloomy den,
She roams the hills, and in the grassy vales
Feeds heedless, till the lion, to his lair
Returning, rends them both; with such a force

Resistless shall Ulysses them destroy.

Jove, Pallas, and Apollo! O that such

As erst in well-built Lesbos, where he threw

Philomelides in a wrestling-match

With mighty force, when all the Greeks rejoic'd,
Such, now, Ulysses might assail them all!
Short life and bitter nuptials shall be theirs*.
But now, such answer as with earnest suit
Thou hast implor'd, direct and true, receive;
For I will nought conceal, but will impart
All that the ancient Prophet of the Deept
Hath taught me, with exactest truth to thee.
The Gods, resenting my neglect to pile
Their altars high with hecatombs, detain'd
Me still in Ægypt, anxious to return,
For just observance of their high behests
Alone can please the Gods. There is an isle
Amid the billowy flood, Pharos by name,
In front of Ægypt, distant from her shore
Far as a vessel, by a sprightly gale

* By Philomelides some have rather absurdly supposed Patroclus, whose mother's name was Philomela, to be intended. But Homer never forms his patronymics from the mother's side, and why should the Greeks exult in the fall of an amiable man, whom all respected. The person in question is therefore, with more probability, affirmed by others to have been the king of Lesbos, whose custom being to challenge all comers, he challenged, on their arrival in his island, the Greecians also.-C.

+ Proteus.

Impell'd may push her voyage in a day*.
It owns a quiet port, and many a ship
Finds wat'ring there from riv'lets on the coast.
There me the Gods kept twenty days, no breeze
Propitious granting, that might sweep the waves,
And usher to her home the flying bark.
And now had our provision, all consum'd,
Left us exhausted, but a certain nymph
Pitied and saved me. Daughter fair was she
Of mighty Proteus, Ancient of the Deep,
Idothea nam'd; her most my sorrows mov'd;
She found me wandering alone, remote
From all my foll'wers, who around the isle
The fishes snaring roam'd, by famine urg'd,
And, standing at my side, me thus bespake†:
Stranger Thou sure art childish, or of heart
Dull and insensible, or thy delight

Is in distress and mis'ry. Wherefore else
Within these island-limits art thou pent

Thus long, nor end hast found of ling'ring here,
Where famine wastes thy people day by day?

In the heroic ages the distance might be such; though now, by the accumulation of soil from the mouth of the Nile, it is united to the land, or nearly so.-B. & C.

+ Idothea is said to have been enamoured of Canobus, the pilot of Menelaus.-B.

So spake the Goddess, and I thus replied:
I tell thee, whosoever of the Pow'rs
Divine thou art, that I am prison'd here
Not willingly, but must have, doubtless, sinn'd
Against the deathless tenants of the skies.
Yet say (for the Immortals all things know)
What God detains me, and my course forbids
Hence to my country o'er the fishy Deep?
I spake; when thus the Goddess all-divine:
for all that I relate is true.

Hear me,

A faithful seer, the ancient of the Deep,
Immortal Proteus, the Ægyptian, haunts
These shores, familiar with all Ocean's gulfs,
Neptune's attendant ever, and esteem'd
My father. Him if thou art able once

To seize and bind, he will prescribe the course
With all its measur'd distances, by which
Thou shalt regain secure thy native shores.
He will, moreover, at thy suit declare,

Thou favour'd of the skies! what good, what ill
Hath in thine house befall'n, while absent thou
Thy voyage difficult perform'st and long*.

* Ο, τι τοι ἐν μεγάροισι κακόν τ' ἀγαθόν τε τέτυκται. What good and what evil hath befallen thee in thy house. Socrates, as Gellius says, accounted this line of Homer's his dearest and best treasure, and declared that it comprises the sum total of

She spake, and I replied-Thyself reveal
By what effectual bands I may secure
The ancient Deity marine, lest, warn'd
Of my approach, he shun me and escape.
Hard task for mortal hands to bind a God!

Then thus Idothea answer'd all-divine:

I will inform thee true. Soon as the sun
Hath clim'd the middle heav'ns, the prophet old,
Emerging while the breezy zephyr blows,

And cover'd with the scum of ocean, seeks
His spacious cove, in which outstretch'd he lies.
The phoca* also, rising from the waves,
Offspring of beauteous Halosydna, sleep
Around him, numerous, the fishy scent
Exhaling rank of the unfathom'd floodt.
Thither conducting thee at early dawn
I will dispose thee in some safe recess,

philosophy.-C. The line, however, must be detached from the context, and have a new sense given it, before it can serve the uses to which he applied it. For Homer means simply to say by it, that Proteus would inform Menelaus of all that had happened in his absence: whereas Socrates found in it a hint, not to suffer his curiosity to tempt him astray in quest of knowledge more specious than useful, but rather to attend to what was passing at home and in his own heart. An excellent lesson certainly, but not found here or any where else in Homer.

* Seals, or sea-calves.

† According to Ælian no animal sleeps so sound.-B.