Odyssey 1.186 · Book 1, lines 186–190
A guest-friendship claimed — and old Laertes
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ἐν λιμένι Ῥείθρῳ ὑπὸ Νηίῳ ὑλήεντι. ξεῖνοι δʼ ἀλλήλων πατρώιοι εὐχόμεθʼ εἶναι ἐξ ἀρχῆς, εἴ πέρ τε γέροντʼ εἴρηαι ἐπελθὼν Λαέρτην ἥρωα, τὸν οὐκέτι φασὶ πόλινδε ἔρχεσθʼ, ἀλλʼ ἀπάνευθεν ἐπʼ ἀγροῦ πήματα πάσχειν
in the harbor Rheithron, under wooded Neion. And we claim to be guest-friends of one another, ancestral ones, from the start, if indeed you would go and ask the old man, the hero Laertes, who, they say, no longer comes to the city, but far off on his farm suffers woes
Word by word
The setting
Athena, disguised as Mentes lord of the Taphians, is still speaking to Telemachus. She has just told him where her ship lies moored; now she builds her false credentials — an inherited guest-friendship with the house of Odysseus, vouched for by the old man Laertes, whom she pictures worn down on his farm.
A note on this passage
Athena finishes locating her ship and then does what a stranger must do in this world: she establishes who she is by naming a bond. She claims a ξενία — a guest-friendship inherited from the fathers — between her house and the house of Odysseus, and offers old Laertes as the witness who can confirm it.
The lie is built out of true things. Laertes really has withdrawn to his farm in grief, and the poem will bring us there in its last book. Athena's cover story works because it is stitched from the household's real wounds: the credential she invents is the family's actual sorrow, offered casually to a son who does not yet know he is being tested.
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