Odyssey 1.191 · Book 1, lines 191–193
The old man and his one servant
Read the full text in our reader
γρηὶ σὺν ἀμφιπόλῳ, ἥ οἱ βρῶσίν τε πόσιν τε παρτιθεῖ, εὖτʼ ἄν μιν κάματος κατὰ γυῖα λάβῃσιν ἑρπύζοντʼ ἀνὰ γουνὸν ἀλωῆς οἰνοπέδοιο.
with an old serving-woman, who sets beside him food and drink, whenever weariness seizes his limbs as he creeps up the slope of his vineyard plot.
Word by word
The setting
Athena's picture of Laertes continues: he lives apart on the farm, tended by a single aged serving-woman, dragging himself along his vineyard slope when weariness takes him. The detail is tender and exact — the portrait of a proud man let go to ruin.
A note on this passage
The portrait sharpens into one image: the old king reduced to a single servant, hauling himself up his own vineyard when his legs give out. Homer gives him a body that fails — the weariness that "seizes his limbs" — rather than an abstract grief.
This is the household's decay made physical. While the suitors devour the estate at the center, its oldest man has crept to the margin of the land and nearly out of the story. The vineyard, a thing Laertes planted and tends, is the poem's quiet emblem of a house that still bears fruit even as its master is left to crawl through it.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 1.191 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 1.191 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/1.191/