μῆτιν
The plan that Agamemnon hopes Nestor will construct is called simply mētis. In Iliad 9.423, Achilles had in fact advised the Achaeans to come up with a “better mētis” (μῆτιν ἀμείνω), since he was not going to accept Agamemnon’s offer. The plan that Nestor devises is to send someone on a nighttime spying expedition. Night raids and ambush warfare are linked in the epic tradition by their use of cunning or trickery (mētis) and endurance of prolonged hardship as opposed to the outright brute force (biē) of the battlefield (Edwards 1985:18 and above, “The Poetics of Ambush”). Many of the ambushes that are mentioned in epic occur at night: see e.g. Iliad 21.34–39 and Odyssey 14.468–503. Diomedes will be the hero who volunteers for this particular raid (10.219ff.), and he chooses as his companion Odysseus (10.243), the hero of mētis-style warfare. (For more on the relationship between Diomedes and Odysseus, see below on 10.243.)