To walk into the enemy's city dressed as a battered slave and walk out again with its war-plans — the record files this trick under disguise as a slave, and its Greek witness is a tale told over supper. In the Odyssey (an archaic Greek epic, c. 8th century BCE), in the hall of Menelaus at Lacedaemon, Telemachus has come seeking word of his lost father, and the whole table is weeping for him; so Helen drops into the wine "an herb that banishes all care" and turns the evening toward the cunning of Odysseus. (This telling dresses the Greek names in Roman: Ulysses for Odysseus, Minerva for Athena.)

The deed she remembers is a disguise. Odysseus disfigured himself "with wounds and bruises," "dressed himself all in rags," and slipped into Troy "looking like a menial or a beggar" — a menial being a household slave, the one figure a sentry never troubles to challenge. So lowered, he "entered the city of Troy, and no one said anything to him"; Helen alone knew him, and even she, after she had "washed and anointed him" and sworn an oath not to betray him, could get nothing out of him until he chose to speak. Then, his intelligence gathered, "He killed many Trojans" and made his way back to the ships.

The whole force of the motif sits in that word menial: the sacker of cities passes unchallenged precisely because a slave is the person no one thinks worth a second look. Here only the Greek witness is served; the record's African parallel for the same disguise waits unread on the shelf. What does it say that a hero's surest passport through the enemy's gate is to make himself into someone no one bothers to see?