The Messenger is relating how Menelaus and Helen escape from Egypt in a royal Egyptian ship, under pretext that they are going to carry out a ritual ‘sea burial’ of the supposedly drowned Menelaus. Helen's husband, whose identity was as yet unknown to the Egyptian crew, induced them to let his own shipwrecked crew come on board, and as the bull intended for sacrifice resisted being embarked he here cries to his men to manhandle it—in fact to carry it—on board.