Old Man

he snatched your letter violently from my grasp, Agamemnon, and will not heed the claims of right.

But tell me, how shall my message find credit with your wife or child?

for Tyndareus sent me that day to form part of your wife’s dowry and to wait upon the bride with loyalty.

"This, mind you, is Iatrocles, the antagonist of Melancomas, and the only one who thought not fit to yield to that man—so far at least as in him lay.

And his father, who was very famous—that Melancomas from Caria, who won other contests and at Olympia—him, though not yet a man, he surpassed;

And the gods seem to me to have loved him exceedingly and most of all to have honoured him by his death, that he might have no trial of grievous things.

when Orestes was about to die at the hand of Aegisthus, his father’s old servant stole him away and gave him to Strophius to bring up in the land of the Phocians.

Don’t you know that I was still young when Orestes was driven out of the land?

A scar along his brow, where he fell and drew blood one day in his father’s home when chasing a fawn with you.

-->“Old man, weeder of grassy Onchestus, I am come here from Pieria seeking cattle, cows all of them, all with curving horns, from my herd.

But an old man tilling his flowering vineyard saw him as he was hurrying down the plain through grassy Onchestus.

And when Apollo heard this report, he went yet more quickly on his way, and presently, seeing a long-winged bird, he knew at once by that omen that the thief was the child of Zeus the son of Cronos.

And after not many days, passing by again, he met an old man worn out with many days, wrinkled in face, slack in his legs, bent over, and altogether grey, deprived of his teeth, and speaking with broken words.