Troilus and Cressida, Nestor's Lines: Scene 1.3

Time to be a crabby old man hehehe

Ulysses: …’Tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot, / Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.

(conciliatory) Most wisely hath Ulysses here discovered / The fever whereof all our power is sick.

Ulysses: Success or loss, what is or is not, serves / As stuff for these two to make paradoxes.

(Angrily, adding onto a problem) And in the imitation of these many are infect: / Ajax is grown self-will’d and bears his head / as broad Achilles; keeps his tent like him; / rails on our state of war / Bold as an oracle, and sets Thersites, / a slave whose gall coins slanders like a mint, / To match us in comparisons with dirt!

Menelaus: If then one is, or hath, or means to be, / That one meets Hector; if none else, I am he.

TELL HIM OF NESTOR, one that was a man / When Hector’s grandsire suck’d. (Mournful pause - comedic). He is old now; / But if there be not in our Grecian host / A noble man that hath ONE SPARK OF FIRE / To answer for his love, tell him from me / I’ll hide my silver beard in a gold beaver, / And in my vambrace put my withered brawns!

Agamemnon (directly following the “tell him of Nestor” challenge. Nestor is getting tugged off to side like a confused old man): Fair Lord Aeneas, let me touch your hand; / To our pavilion shall I lead you, sir. / Achilles shall have word of this intent; / So shall each lord of Greece, from tent to tent.

ULYSSES: Nestor!

(turn around slowly) “What says (looks him over) Ulysses?”

But, hit or miss / Our project’s life this shape of sense assumes - / Ajax employ’d plucks down Achilles’ plumes.

Now, Ulysses, I begin to relish thy advice; / And I will give a taste thereof forthwith / To Agamemnon. Go we to him straight. / Two curs shall tame each other: pride alone / Must tarre the mastiffs on, as ‘twere their bone.

END OF 1.3