There was a story that Anius, the King of the Isle of Delos, had three
daughters, named OEno, Spermo, and Elais, and that OEno could turn water
into wine, while Spermo could turn stones into bread, and Elais could
change mud into olive oil. Those fairy gifts, people said, were given to
the maidens by the Wine God, Dionysus, and by the Goddess of Corn,
Demeter. Now corn, and wine, and oil were sorely needed by the Greeks,
who were tired of paying much gold and bronze to the Phoenician merchants
for their supplies. Ulysses therefore went to Agamemnon one day, and
asked leave to take his ship and voyage to Delos, to bring, if he could,
the three maidens to the camp, if indeed they could do these miracles. As
no fighting was going on, Agamemnon gave Ulysses leave to depart, so he
went on board his ship, with a crew of fifty men of Ithaca, and away they
sailed, promising to return in a month.

Two or three days after that, a dirty old beggar man began to be seen in
the Greek camp. He had crawled in late one evening, dressed in a dirty
smock and a very dirty old cloak, full of holes, and stained with smoke.
Over everything he wore the skin of a stag, with half the hair worn off,
and he carried a staff, and a filthy tattered wallet, to put food in,
which swung from his neck by a cord. He came crouching and smiling up to
the door of the hut of Diomede, and sat down just within the doorway,
where beggars still sit in the East. Diomede saw him, and sent him a
loaf and two handfuls of flesh, which the beggar laid on his wallet,
between his feet, and he made his supper greedily, gnawing a bone like a
dog.

After supper Diomede asked him who he was and whence he came, and he told
a long story about how he had been a Cretan pirate, and had been taken
prisoner by the Egyptians when he was robbing there, and how he had
worked for many years in their stone quarries, where the sun had burned