merchants for their supplies. Ulysses therefore went to Agamemnon one
day, and asked leave to take his ship and voyage to Delos, to bring, if
he could, the three maidens to the camp, if indeed they could do these
miracles. As no fighting was going on, Agamemnon gave Ulysses leave to
depart, so he went on board his ship, with a crew of fifty men of
Ithaca, and away they sailed, promising to return in a month.

Two or three days after that, a dirty old beggar man began to be seen in
the Greek camp. He had crawled in late one evening, dressed in a dirty
smock and a very dirty old cloak, full of holes, and stained with smoke.
Over everything he wore the skin of a stag, with half the hair worn off,
and he carried a staff, and a filthy tattered wallet, to put food in,
which swung from his neck by a cord. He came crouching and smiling up to
the door of the hut of Diomede, and sat down just within the doorway,
where beggars still sit in the East. Diomede saw him, and sent him a
loaf and two handfuls of flesh, which the beggar laid on his wallet,
between his feet, and he made his supper greedily, gnawing a bone like a
dog.

After supper Diomede asked him who he was and whence he came, and he
told a long story about how he had been a Cretan pirate, and had been
taken prisoner by the Egyptians when he was robbing there, and how he
had worked for many years in their stone quarries, where the sun had
burned him brown, and had escaped by hiding among the great stones,
carried down the Nile in a raft, for building a temple on the seashore.
The raft arrived at night, and the beggar said that he stole out from it
in the dark and found a Phoenician ship in the harbour, and the
Phoenicians took him on board, meaning to sell him somewhere as a slave.
But a tempest came on and wrecked the ship off the Isle of Tenedos,
which is near Troy, and the beggar alone escaped to the island on a
plank of the ship. From Tenedos he had come to Troy in a fisher's boat,
hoping to make himself useful in the camp, and earn enough to keep body
and soul together till he could find a ship sailing to Crete.

He made his story rather amusing, describing the strange ways of the
Egyptians; how they worshipped cats and bulls, and did everything in
just the opposite of the Greek way of doing things. So Diomede let him
have a rug and blankets to sleep on in the portico of the hut, and next
day the old wretch went begging about the camp and talking with the
soldie