Herodotus, Histories 1.62.4 · 1.62.4
The net is spread
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ἐνθαῦτα θείῃ πομπῇ χρεώμενος παρίσταται Πεισιστράτῳ Ἀμφίλυτος ὁ Ἀκαρνὰν χρησμολόγος ἀνήρ, ὅς οἱ προσιὼν χρᾷ ἐν ἑξαμέτρῳ τόνῳ τάδε λέγων·
Amphilytus — ἔρριπται δʼ ὁ βόλος, τὸ δὲ δίκτυον ἐκπεπέτασται, θύννοι δʼ οἰμήσουσι σεληναίης διὰ νυκτός.
There, acting under divine guidance, a man came to Pisistratus, Amphilytus the Acarnanian, a seer, who, approaching him, chanted this oracle to him in hexameter verse, saying: The cast has been thrown, and the net is spread wide; the tunny-fish will dart through the moonlit night.
Word by word
The setting
There, by what seems divine guidance, a seer named Amphilytus approaches Pisistratus and chants an oracle in hexameters.
A note on this passage
Herodotus frames the seer's arrival as theiēi pompēi, "by divine dispensation," the same phrase he reserves for moments when something larger than chance seems to be steering events. Amphilytus gets a full triple label, ho Akarnan chrēsmologos anēr, "the Acarnanian, an oracle-reciting man," as if Herodotus wants the reader to know exactly what kind of figure is walking up to a king at the edge of a battlefield.
The oracle itself is a fisherman's riddle. Ho bolos is the cast of a net, to diktyon ekpepetastai means the net is already spread wide, and the thynnoi, the tunny-fish, are about to rush into it by moonlight. Nothing in the verse names Pisistratus or his enemies; it simply says the trap is set and the catch is coming, and leaves the king, and the reader, to work out who is fish and who is net.
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