Odyssey 3.301 · Book 3, lines 301–305
Aegisthus rules his seven years
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Nestor — ὣς ὁ μὲν ἔνθα πολὺν βίοτον καὶ χρυσὸν ἀγείρων ἠλᾶτο ξὺν νηυσὶ κατʼ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους· τόφρα δὲ ταῦτʼ Αἴγισθος ἐμήσατο οἴκοθι λυγρά. κτείνας Ἀτρεΐδην, δέδμητο δὲ λαὸς ὑπʼ αὐτῷ. ἑπτάετες δʼ ἤνασσε πολυχρύσοιο Μυκήνης,
So he, gathering much substance and gold, wandered with his ships among men of alien speech. Meanwhile Aegisthus plotted grievous things at home. For seven years he ruled gold-rich Mycenae, having slain Atreus' son, and the people had been subdued beneath him.
Word by word
The setting
Nestor is winding up his account of the returns from Troy. Menelaus, blown off course, roams the eastern seas gathering wealth; and while he is gone the story cuts back to Argos, where Aegisthus, having murdered Agamemnon, holds the throne of Mycenae.
A note on this passage
Two homecomings are cut against each other. Menelaus is safe but scattered, piling up gold on foreign shores; Aegisthus is home, and home is exactly where the crime is. The seven quiet years of his reign are the horror: not a coup but a settled usurpation, a whole people broken to a murderer's rule.
The undercurrent is the mirror Nestor keeps holding up. This is the Agamemnon story, the poem's dark twin of Ithaca — a lord away, a house seized, a people cowed. Telemachus is meant to hear his own household's danger inside another man's ruin, and the gold Menelaus gathers only sharpens how long the wound at home had to fester.
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