"[ ], I am afraid Homer's description is bound to fit me better than yours. Mine is a case of an obvious inferior arriving uninvited at the table of a man of letters. I think you'd better figure out a good excuse for bringing me along, because, you know, I won't admit I've come without an invitation. I'll say I'm your guest."

My beloved thrust his hand into the opening,
and my inmost being yearned for him.
I arose to open to my beloved,
and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with liquid myrrh,
upon the handles of the bolt,
I opened to my beloved,
but my beloved had turned and was gone.

Come to think of it, I should have mentioned this much earlier: even his ideas and arguments are just like those hollow statues of Silenus. If you were to listen to his arguments, at first they'd strike you as totally ridiculous; they're clothed in words as coarse as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. He's always going on about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners; he's always making the same tired old points in the same tired old words. If you are foolish, or simply unfamiliar with him, you'd find it impossible not to laugh at his arguments. But if you see them when they open up like the statues, if you go behind their surface, you'll realize that no other arguments make any sense.

I got stories. But I'll save them. So many stories. Most of them unspeakable but I suppose in time I'll find a way to tell. Like what I said to a Yankee when I met him face to face. And other things. I'll be an old man on this porch surrounded by his children telling war stories. I'll tell everything to the children.

He dropped then to the ground in the dust, like some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with branches growing at the uttermost tree-top:
one whom a man, a maker of chariots, fells with the shining
iron, to bend it into a wheel for a fine wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening by the banks of a river.

He seems to me equal to gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking.

Inside Proteus' precinct is a sanctuary sacred to 'the Foreign Aphrodite'. I have come to the conclusion that the person it is sacred to is Helen the daughter of Tyndareus, not only because I am aware of the story that Helen spent some time in Egypt with Proteus, but also, and in particular, because the sanctuary is called the sanctuary of the *Foreign* Aphrodite; no other sanctuary of Aphrodite is called 'foreign'.

"Surely this lust for conflict is not womanlike?"

Most likely. What I know surely is he's smart. Crafty. Thinks circles around everybody. He once snuck into a Rebel camp and got to know all their ways and snuck out again and they didn't even know he'd been there. And he sneaks up on his own men all the time. That's the key to his strategy.

When I read those exquisite lips, I can watch them gently repeating
my words–but I can never *hear* you repeat them!.....
I know you now and I know myself. Yes, I am the cause
of the fire inside me, the fuel that burns and the flame that lights it.
What can I do? Must I woo or be wooed? What else can I plead for?
All I desire I have. My wealth has left me a pauper.
Oh how I wish that I and my body could now be parted, I wish my love were not here!

"I set no limits to their fortunes and
no time; I give them empire without end."

Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring the out to you, and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men, for they have come under the shelter of my roof.

"But may I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before I
hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.”

"Do not let love or treaty tie our peoples.
May an avenger rise up from my bones,
one who will track with firebrand and sword
the Dardan settlers, now and in the future,
at any time that ways present themselves.
I call your shores to war against their shores,
your waves against their waves, arms with their arms.
Let them and their sons' sons learn what is war"

Never shall I, myself,
honor the wicked and reject the just.
The man who is well-minded to the state
from me in death and life shall have his honor.

The rest
I leave to silence for an ox stands huge upon
my tongue. The house itself, could it take voice, might speak
aloud and plain. I speak to those who understand,
but if they fail, I have forgotten everything.

Know well yourself, the sun won't roll its course
many more days, before you come to give
corpse for these corpses, child of your own loins.
For you've confused the upper and lower worlds.

"The time will arrive
when the length of days shall shrink my body from all it has been
to a tiny frame, and my age-worn limbs be reduced to the weight
of a feather. Then no one will ever believe that I was once adored
and desired by a god. Yes, even Phoebus may fail to recall me
or else he'll deny that he loved me. So changed, so invisible! Yet,
the fates will leave me my voice, the voice by which men will know me."

"But where shall wisdom be found?
And where is the place of understanding?
Mortals do not know the way to it,
and it is not found in the land of the living."

I would prefer to be a workman,
hired by a poor man on a peasant farm,
than rule as king of all the dead.