Odyssey 1.158 · Book 1, lines 158–162
They eat another man's life
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Telemachus — ξεῖνε φίλʼ, ἦ καί μοι νεμεσήσεαι ὅττι κεν εἴπω; τούτοισιν μὲν ταῦτα μέλει, κίθαρις καὶ ἀοιδή, ῥεῖʼ, ἐπεὶ ἀλλότριον βίοτον νήποινον ἔδουσιν, ἀνέρος, οὗ δή που λεύκʼ ὀστέα πύθεται ὄμβρῳ κείμενʼ ἐπʼ ἠπείρου, ἢ εἰν ἁλὶ κῦμα κυλίνδει.
Dear guest, will you be angry with me at what I say? These men care only for this: the lyre and song — easily, since they devour another's livelihood unpunished, a man whose white bones rot in the rain, lying on the mainland, or the wave rolls them in the sea.
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The setting
Speaking low to the disguised Athena, Telemachus points at the suitors and names what they are doing: consuming the household of a man they believe dead, unburied somewhere far off.
A note on this passage
Telemachus names the crime plainly. The suitors care for nothing but music and feasting, and it comes cheap to them — ῥεῖα, ‘easily’ — because the wealth they burn through is not theirs. They eat νήποινον, without paying, the property of a man who cannot stop them.
The undercurrent is how the accusation opens onto grief. The owner of the plundered house is a corpse the sea has taken: white bones rotting in the rain on some far shore, or rolled in the surf. The careless music plays directly over that image of an unburied body. For a Greek a man left unburied is a wrong against the gods — and the poem lets the harp sound above it.
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