cut off by death in the infancy of their ambitious project. Phaedra was
there, and Procris, and Ariadne, mournful for Theseus's desertion, and
Maera, and Clymene, and Eryphile, who preferred gold before wedlock faith.

But now came a mournful ghost, that late was Agamemnon, son of Atreus, the
mighty leader of all the host of Greece and their confederate kings that
warred against Troy. He came with the rest to sip a little of the blood at
that uncomfortable banquet. Ulysses was moved with compassion to see him
among them, and asked him what untimely fate had brought him there, if
storms had overwhelmed him coming from Troy, or if he had perished in some
mutiny by his own soldiers at a division of the prey.

"By none of these," he replied, "did I come to my death; but slain at a
banquet to which I was invited by Aegisthus after my return home. He
conspiring with my adulterous wife, they laid a scheme for my destruction,
training me forth to a banquet as an ox goes to the slaughter, and, there
surrounding me, they slew me with all my friends about me.

"Clytemnestra, my wicked wife, forgetting the vows which she swore to me
in wedlock, would not lend a hand to close my eyes in death. But nothing
is so heaped with impieties as such a woman, who would kill her spouse
that married her a maid. When I brought her home to my house a bride, I
hoped in my heart that she would be loving to me and to my children. Now,
her black treacheries have cast a foul aspersion on her whole sex. Blessed
husbands will have their loving wives in suspicion for her bad deeds."

"Alas!" said Ulysses, "there seems to be a fatality in your royal house of
Atreus, and that they are hated of Jove for their wives. For Helen's sake,
your brother Menelaus's wife, what multitudes fell in the wars of Troy!"