Odyssey 1.174 · Book 1, lines 174–177
A guest-friend of my father's?
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καί μοι τοῦτʼ ἀγόρευσον ἐτήτυμον, ὄφρʼ ἐὺ εἰδῶ, ἠὲ νέον μεθέπεις ἦ καὶ πατρώιός ἐσσι ξεῖνος, ἐπεὶ πολλοὶ ἴσαν ἀνέρες ἡμέτερον δῶ ἄλλοι, ἐπεὶ καὶ κεῖνος ἐπίστροφος ἦν ἀνθρώπων.
And tell me this truly, so I may know well: whether you come as a newcomer, or are a guest-friend of my father's, since many other men used to come to our house, for he too went among men.
Word by word
The setting
Telemachus adds one more question, the one that matters most to a household bound by xenia: is this a first-time visitor, or an inherited guest-friend of Odysseus — since his father, in better days, went among many men and made such bonds.
A note on this passage
One more question, and it is the load-bearing one. Telemachus wants to know whether this stranger is new, or a πατρώιος ξεῖνος — a guest-friend inherited from his father. That bond, xenia, ran between houses and down the generations: a man received where his father had been received, obliged where his father had obliged.
The question aches under its formula. To ask whether the guest knew Odysseus is to reach for the father through a stranger — and the reason so many men ‘used to come’ to the house is that Odysseus, in the days before Troy, was a man who went among men. The full hall of former guests measures the emptiness now. Telemachus is asking, in the only polite words he has, whether this visitor can give him back a piece of the father he never really knew.
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