Nestor

With all sincerity and goodwill, therefore, he addressed them thus:

end this quarrel with Achilles, who in the day of battle is a tower of strength to the Achaeans.

Moreover I have been the familiar friend of men even greater than you are, and they did not disregard my counsels.

then it was that Odysseus alone was able to call them back and turn them about, and at last by his speech, together with Nestor, persuaded them to remain.

So that Agamemnon prayed for ten such old men to be his counselors, rather than young warriors like Ajax and Achilles, since thus Troy would the sooner be taken.

"And the others, the best and most kingly of his heroes, he represented as having no less earnest concern for such ability—Diomedes and Odysseus and Nestor, this last surpassing all in understanding and persuasiveness.

First go to Pylos and ask Nestor;

"My sons," said he, "make haste to do as I shall bid you.

"Now," said he, "that our guests have done their dinner, it will be best to ask them who they are.

For Messene furnished Nestor, the wisest of all who lived in those times;

I was speaking in reply to those who reproach us with the misfortunes of the Melians and of villages with like populations, not meaning that we had done no wrong in these instances, but trying to show that those who are the idols of these speakers have laid waste more and greater cities than the Athenians have done, in which connection I discussed the virtues of Agamemnon and Menelaus and Nestor, …

We know of Nestor and Lycian Sarpedon, whom men speak of, from melodious words which skilled craftsmen join together.

The old man of Messene, his mind reeling, shouted to his son;

For the horse kept Nestor’s chariot from moving, since it had been wounded by Paris’ arrows;

For if it had been bad, Homer would never have been for representing Nestor as an orator;

And so both those Seven, who were held and named by the Greeks sophoi, by our countrymen sapientes (wise men), and, many ages before, Lycurgus, in whose times Homer too is reported to have lived, before this city was founded, and already in the heroic ages Ulysses and Nestor — we have heard that these both were and were held wise men.

In like manner too the poet Euphorion brings in Nestor saying:

Also I saw upon Gerenian Nestor’s prows from Pylos the ensign of his neighbour Alpheus, four-footed like a bull.

In the Homeric literature, for instance, the deceitful cunning of Ulysses appears as a virtue of the same rank with the prudence of Nestor, the constancy of Hector, and the gallantry of Achilles.

for in the eleventh book of the Iliad, we find Nestor giving an account of the reprisals, which he had made upon the Epeian nation, from whom he took a great number of cattle, as a satisfaction for a prize which his father Neleus had won at the Elian games;

and lastly, they found that Messene was theirs as a prize taken in war, for Heracles, when he had been robbed of the cattle from Erytheia, by Neleus and all his sons except Nestor, had taken the country captive and slain the offenders, but had committed the city to Nestor’s charge, believing him to be prudent, because, although the youngest of his brethren, he had taken no part in their iniquity.

Nor of Nestor’s either, unless you are disguising Gorgias under the name of Nestor and Thrasymachus or Theodorus under that of Odysseus.

Then you have heard only of the treatises on rhetoric by Nestor and Odysseus, which they wrote when they had nothing to do at Troy, and you have not heard of that by Palamedes?

you may couple Nestor, Antenor, or others I might mention, with Pericles;

He returns and takes counsel with his brother about the expedition against Ilium, and Menelaus then goes to Nestor.

For if you regard the nature of things, even the life of Nestor is short, and that of Sattia, who ordered it to be inscribed on her tomb that she had lived ninety-nine years.

Him they surname Soter (Saviour), and Christ, and Sermo "of his fathers," and "All-things" now, as being constructed out of the deflowering of all—the Jackdaw of Aesop, the Pandora of Hesiod, the Dish of Accius, the Hotchpotch of Nestor, the Miscellany of Ptolemy.

Or if it is the privilege of philosophers, and assuredly of Greeks — as though Scythians and Indians too did not philosophize — why does Epicurus remember himself as no one before, Chrysippus as no one, Zeno as no one, not even Plato himself, whom perhaps we would have believed Nestor on account of the honey of his eloquence?

Any one of you, therefore, who wishes to acquire the art of the householder, the political leader, or the general, or to become like Achilles or Ajax or Nestor or Odysseus, should seek my favour, for I understand all these things.