Nestor admits that it is an anxious night, and rather blames Menelaus for not rousing the other chiefs; but Agamemnon explains and defends his brother. Nestor then puts on the comfortable cloak already described, and picks up a spear, [blank space] _in HIS QUARTERS_. As for Odysseus, he merely throws a shield over his shoulders. The company of Diomede are sleeping with their heads on their shields. Thence Reichel (see "The Shield") infers that the late poet of Book X. gave them small Ionian round bucklers; but it has been shown that no such inference is legitimate. Their spears were erect by their sides, fixed in the ground by the _sauroter_, or butt-spike, used by the men of the late "warrior vase" found at Mycenae. To arrange the spears thus, we have seen, was a point of drill that, in Aristotle's time, survived among the Illyrians. [Footnote: _Poetics_, XXV.] The practice is also alluded to in _Iliad_, III 135. During a truce "the tall spears are planted by their sides." The poet, whether ignorant or learned, knew that point of war, later obsolete in Greece, but still extant in Illyria. Nestor aroused Diomede, whose night apparel was the pelt of a lion; he took his spear, and they came to the outposts, where the men were awake, and kept a keen watch on all movements among the Trojans. Nestor praised them, and the princes, taking Nestor's son, Thrasymedes, and Meriones with them, went out into the open in view of the Trojan camp, sat down, and held a consultation. Nestor asked if any one would volunteer to go as a spy among the Trojans and pick up intelligence. His reward will be "a black ewe with her lamb at her foot," from their chiefs--"nothing like her for value"--and he will be remembered in songs at feasts, _or_ will be admitted to feasts and wine parties of the chiefs. [Footnote: Leaf, Note on X. 215.] The proposal is very odd; what do the princes want with black ewes, while at feasts they always have honoured places? Can Nestor be thinking of sending out any brave swift-footed young member of the outpost party, to whom the reward would be appropriate? After silence, Diomede volunteers to go, with a comrade, though this kind of work is very seldom undertaken in any army of any age by a chief, and by his remark about admission to wine parties it is clear that Nestor was not thinking of a princely spy. Many others volunteer, but Agamemnon bids Diomede choose his own companion, with a very broad hint not to take Menelaus. _HIS_ death, Agamemnon knows, would mean the disgraceful return of the host to Greece; besides he is, throughout the _ILIAD_, deeply attached to his brother.