ed 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 soldiers. Now
he was a most impudent and annoying old vagabond, and was always in
quarrels. If there was a disagreeable story about the father or
grandfather of any of the princes, he knew it and told it, so that he got
a blow from the baton of Agamemnon, and Aias gave him a kick, and
Idomeneus drubbed him with the butt of his spear for a tale about his
grandmother, and everybody hated him and called him a nuisance. He was
for ever jeering at Ulysses, who was far away, and telling tales about
Autolycus, and a