Ulysses answered, “Lady, as you have said, we two are friends from of old, and your friend I will be till the last, when the Greeks break into Troy, and slay the men, and carry the women captives.  If I live till that hour no man shall harm you, but safely and in honour you shall come to your palace in Lacedaemon of the rifted hills.  Moreover, I swear to you a great oath, by Zeus above, and by Them that under earth punish the souls of men who swear falsely, that I shall tell no man the thing which you have spoken.”

So when he had sworn and done that oath, Helen was comforted and dried her tears.  Then she told him how unhappy she was, and how she had lost her last comfort when Hector died.  “Always am I wretched,” she said, “save when sweet sleep falls on me.  Now the wife of Thon, King of Egypt, gave me this gift when we were in Egypt, on our way to Troy, namely, a drug that brings sleep even to the most unhappy, and it is pressed from the poppy heads of the garland of the God of Sleep.”  Then she showed him strange phials of gold, full of this drug:  phials wrought by the Egyptians, and covered with magic spells and shapes of beasts and flowers.  “One of these I will give you,” she said, “that even from Troy town you may not go without a gift in memory of the hands of Helen.”  So Ulysses took the phial of gold, and was glad in his heart, and Helen set before him meat and wine.  When he had eaten and drunk, and his strength had come back to him, he said: 

“Now I must dress me again in my old rags, and take my wallet, and my staff, and go forth, and beg through Troy town.  For here I must abide for some days as a beggar man, lest if I now escape from your house in the night the Trojans may think that you have told me the secrets of their counsel, which I am carrying to the Greeks, and may be angry with you.”  So he clothed himself again as a beggar, and took his staff, and hid the phial of gold with the Egyptian drug in his rags, and in his wallet also he put the new clothes that Helen had given him, and a sword, and he took farewell, saying, “Be of good heart, for the end of your sorrows is at hand.  But if you see me among the beggars in the street, or by the well, take no heed of me, only I will salute you as a beggar who has been kindly treated by a Queen.”

So they parted, and Ulysses went out, and when it was day he was with the beggars in the streets, but by night he commonly slept near the fire of a smithy forge, as is the way of beggars.  So for some days he begged, saying that he was gathering food to eat while he walked to some town far away that was at peace, where he might find work to do.  He was not impudent now, and did not go to rich men’s houses or tell evil tales, or laugh, but he was much in the temples, praying to the Gods, and above all in the temple of Pallas Athene.  The Trojans thought that he was a pious man for a beggar.

Now there was a custom in these times that men and women who were sick or in distress, should sleep at night on the floors of the temples.  They did this hoping that the God would send them a dream to show them how their diseases might be cured, or how they might find what they had lost, or might escape from their distresses.