Rhesus
I too am just the same; straight to the point I cut my way; no shuffling nature is mine. My heart was wrung with sorer anguish than yours at my absence from this land; I fumed and chafed, but Scythian people, whose borders march with mine, made war on me on the very eve of my departure for Ilium; I had reached the strand of the Euxine sea, there to transport my Thracian army. Then my spear poured out over Scythia’s land great drops of bloody rain, and Thrace too shared in the mingled slaughter. This then was what chanced to keep me from coming to the land of Troy and joining your standard. But as soon as I had conquered these and taken their children as hostages and appointed the yearly tribute they should pay my house, I have come, sailing across the sea’s mouth, and on foot traversing the other borders of your land—not as you in your jeers at those carousals of my countrymen hint, nor sleeping soft in gilded palaces, but amid the frozen hurricanes that vex the Thracian sea and the Paeonian shores, learning as I lay awake what suffering is, this soldier’s cloak my only wrap. True my coming has tarried, but yet I am in time; ten years already have you been at the fray, and accomplished nothing yet; day in, day out, you fall, throwing the dice of war with Argives. But the light of one day will be enough for me to sack those towers and fall upon their anchored fleet and slay the Achaeans; and on the next day I will go home from Ilium, at one stroke ending all your toil. Let none of you lay hand to spear to lift it, for I, for all my late arrival, will with my lance make utter havoc of those vaunting Achaeans.
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