A Sminthean Postscript

[sdi]

[The goddess] turned [...] Teiresias into a mouse, which is why they say a mouse [...] can tell the future (because it is Teiresias). That it can tell the future is clear because [...] it flees a house in danger of collapse.

(Eustathios of Thessolonike on the Odyssey 1665.48 ff.)

---

But as [when king Laodamas had been killed in battle,] Teiresias told [the Thebaians] to send a herald to treat with the Argives, and themselves to take to flight, they did send a herald to the enemy, and, mounting their children and women on the wagons, themselves fled from the city.

(Apollodoros, Library III vii §3, as translated by J. G. Frazer.)

---

Sophocles, the tragic poet, in his drama Laocoon represents Aineias, just before the taking of the city, as removing his household to Mount Ida in obedience to the orders of his father Ankhises, who recalled the injunctions of Aphrodite and from the omens that had lately happened in the case of Laocoon's family conjectured the approaching destruction of the city. His iambics, which are spoken by a messenger, are as follows:

Now at the gates arrives the goddess' son,
Aineas, his sire upon his shoulders borne
Aloft, while down that back by thunderbolt
Of Zeus once smit the linen mantle streams;
Surrounding them the crowd of household slaves.
There follows a multitude beyond belief
Who long to join this Phrygian colony.

(Dionusios of Halikarnassos, Roman Antiquities, as translated by Earnest Cary and Edward Spelman, with minor edits by yours truly.)