Page 374 - the-odyssey

with their blood.
Leiodes then caught the knees of Ulysses and said,
‘Ulysses I beseech you have mercy upon me and spare me.
I never wronged any of the women in your house either in
word or deed, and I tried to stop the others. I saw them,
but they would not listen, and now they are paying for their
folly. I was their sacrificing priest; if you kill me, I shall die
without having done anything to deserve it, and shall have
got no thanks for all the good that I did.’
Ulysses looked sternly at him and answered, ‘If you were
their sacrificing priest, you must have prayed many a time
that it might be long before I got home again, and that you
might marry my wife and have children by her. Therefore
you shall die.’
With these words he picked up the sword that Agelaus
had dropped when he was being killed, and which was ly-
ing upon the ground. Then he struck Leiodes on the back
of his neck, so that his head fell rolling in the dust while he
was yet speaking.
The minstrel Phemius son of Terpes—he who had been
forced by the suitors to sing to them—now tried to save his
life. He was standing near towards the trap door, {174} and
held his lyre in his hand. He did not know whether to fly out
of the cloister and sit down by the altar of Jove that was in
the outer court, and on which both Laertes and Ulysses had
offered up the thigh bones of many an ox, or whether to go
straight up to Ulysses and embrace his knees, but in the end
he deemed it best to embrace Ulysses’ knees. So he laid his
lyre on the ground between the mixing bowl {175} and the