Now the passage implies that he was in the third γενεὴ, and in the midst, i. e. not at either extremity, of it: the words are μετὰ τριτάτοισιν. No lower number than thirty years will place Nestor fairly among, or in the midst of, the third generation from his birth. If, for example, we take five and twenty years as the term, he would have been not so much among the third as on the eve of arriving within the fourth generation. But neither can we assign to γενεὴ any meaning, which shall make it sensibly exceed thirty years. For as we may say with confidence that the Nestor of the Iliad is over seventy, so, on the other hand, we may fairly compute that he is under eighty; inasmuch as, though he takes no part in exertions actually athletic, he spares himself nothing else. He is found by Agamemnon, when the commander in chief goes his rounds, on the field and at the head of his division: he is wakeful for the night council, and he goes about awaking others[827]. Retaining so large a share of bodily activity, he is still not represented as possessed of strength in such a degree as to border upon the marvellous; he is simply, in regard to corporal qualities, what would now be called a remarkably fine old gentleman. But if instead of thirty we were to take forty years, then, in order to have well entered into the third term he must have been already much beyond eighty, indeed, probably beyond ninety, in the Iliad, and above an hundred in the Odyssey; an age, which, as he retains in that poem all his mental powers, we may be quite sure Homer did not mean to assign to him. If, then, γενεὴ meant any term of years, it must, in all likelihood, have been somewhere about thirty years. [827] Il. x. 157. Homer has been careful, in the case of Nestor, to mark, by an appropriate change of expressions, the difference between his age in the two poems respectively. In the Iliad he is exercising the kingly office _among_ the third generation since his birth. In the Odyssey he is said to have exhausted the three terms[828]; [828] Od. iii. 245. The meaning may be that he had _reigned_ for above two generations: but in the Iliad no more is implied than that he had _lived_ well into a third. τρὶς γὰρ δή μίν φασιν ἀνάξασθαι γενε’ ἀνδρῶν.