The art of reading a room

 Phrasius, a Greek from Cyprus who was said to be a son of Pygmalion, had a reputation as a visionary.

Busiris, king of Egypt, called him to the palace when the land was ravaged by drought. The king and his counselors spoke of failed crops and starvation.

Phrasius said it would be a good idea to sacrifice a stranger once a year. Stranger meant foreigner or immigrant.

The king and his counselors, looking around the room, saw only one stranger.

It’s a lesson to writers on the importance of point of view.

Had he thought about it, Phrasius might have discovered some surprising possibilities in how that story was best told.

Robert Graves tells the story in his account of the Labors of Heracles.

Heracles had just strangled Busiris’s half-brother, Antaeus, king of Libya, and was headed home to Mycenae with a load of golden apples. Antaeus was a child of Mother Earth. As a wrestler, he gained strength from her touch every time he hit the ground. The more Antaeus was thrown, the stronger he got, and he killed every challenger until Heracles figured it out and throttled him aloft.

Wherever Heracles went, he was repulsed by human sacrifice. Graves says the Heracles stories glorify the cult of Olympian gods at the expense of the old cult of Cronus, which practiced human sacrifice.

Busiris was delighted when Heracles showed up as an uninvited guest. Heracles allowed the Egyptian priests to bind him on the sacrificial altar, even though he could break any bonds forged by men. Heracles was on the altar when Busiris approached with an ax.

That was the end of Busiris. Heracles hated human sacrifice, but he loved blood and gore.

• Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: 2; Penguin Books, 1968, pp. 146-8.