___ Islands, in the Bering Strait

Usage examples of diomede.

Like the gods themselves, and like me, Diomedes the man will now be part machine, his eyes and skin and very blood enhanced by nanotechnologies from some future age far beyond my short life span.

The chariot has been halted in the act of bearing down on Diomedes, all the human players here unaware that the goddess Athena has stopped everything while she plays dolls with her chosen champion, dressing Diomedes in forcefields and thru-view contact lenses and nano-augmenters like some pre-teen girl playing with her Barbie.

In the last slowed seconds before real-time resumes, I remember that if the actual fighting goes the way of the old poem, Aphrodite herself will be injured by Diomedes in the coming hour.

Athena finishes her fussing with Diomedes and releases her grip on space and time.

There is a mist of blood in the air around shining Diomedes and a heap of corpses on each side of the slashing, hacking, stabbing Achaean.

The augmented Diomedes appears to be hacking his way through waves of human flesh to catch up to the slowly retreating Aphrodite.

Yet even from among them they increased the number of their gods for they made Diomede a god.

But because the companions of Diomede were of a sudden nowhere to be seen, and afterwards could nowhere be found, being destroyed by bad avenging angels, they were believed to have been changed into those birds, which were secretly brought there from other places where such birds were, and suddenly substituted for them by fraud.

But that they bring water in their beaks and sprinkle it on the temple of Diomede, and that they fawn on men of Greek race and persecute aliens, is no wonderful thing to be done by the inward influence of the demons, whose interest it is to persuade men that Diomede was made a god, and thus to beguile them into worshipping many false gods, to the great dishonor of the true God.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve overheard one of the Achaeans gripe that if Menelaus had been a better lover—“had a bigger cock” was the way Diomedes crudely put it to a friend within my earshot three years ago—then Helen wouldn’t have run off with Paris to Ilium and the heroes of the Greek isles wouldn’t have wasted the past nine years on this accursed siege.

Agamemnon’s friend and the ultimate commander of the Argolis fighters, plain-speaking Diomedes, is also here, not happy tonight, glowering at the ground, his arms folded.

Old Nestor—“the clear speaker of Pylos”—stands near the halfway point of the inner circle and looks even less happy than Diomedes as Agamemnon and Achilles raise the level of their anger and abuse toward one other.

Now with my enhanced vision—enhanced by the contact lenses from the gods—I can see Athena across the milling no-man’s-land of lances, preparing Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, as a killing machine.

The Trojan turns to flee—leaving his brother’s body behind in the dust in his panic—but Diomedes throws strong and true, casting the long spear at the center of the running man’s back.

But the Trojans are split—some running in terror at the approach of blazing Diomedes, some turning in obedience to the war god’s booming voice.