Odyssey 3.254 · Book 3, lines 254–257
I'll tell you all, child
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Nestor — τοιγὰρ ἐγώ τοι, τέκνον, ἀληθέα πάντʼ ἀγορεύσω. ἦ τοι μὲν τάδε καὐτὸς ὀίεαι, ὥς κεν ἐτύχθη, εἰ ζωόν γʼ Αἴγισθον ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἔτετμεν Ἀτρεΐδης Τροίηθεν ἰών, ξανθὸς Μενέλαος·
Well then, child, I will tell you all the truth. Indeed you yourself can guess these things, how it would have gone, if he had found Aegisthus alive in the halls, coming home from Troy, the son of Atreus, fair-haired Menelaus —
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Nestor begins his long reply. Before telling how Agamemnon died, he opens with what might have happened if Menelaus had come home in time to catch the killer.
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Nestor answers with an old man's assurance: I will tell you everything, child. And he begins not with the murder but with a might-have-been — you can imagine, he says, how differently it would have gone had Menelaus caught Aegisthus alive in the house on his way back from Troy.
The warmth is real; téknon, 'child,' folds Telemachus into a grandfatherly intimacy. But Nestor's instinct is telling: before he will describe the crime, he wants to picture the vengeance that almost was. Homer's world runs on requital, and the old counselor frames the whole story as a debt — one that, this time, a brother arrived too late to collect.
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