Odyssey 1.242 · Book 1, lines 242–245
Not for him alone I grieve
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οἴχετʼ ἄιστος ἄπυστος, ἐμοὶ δʼ ὀδύνας τε γόους τε κάλλιπεν. οὐδέ τι κεῖνον ὀδυρόμενος στεναχίζω οἶον, ἐπεί νύ μοι ἄλλα θεοὶ κακὰ κήδεʼ ἔτευξαν. ὅσσοι γὰρ νήσοισιν ἐπικρατέουσιν ἄριστοι,
He is gone, unseen, unheard of, and to me he left pains and laments. Nor is it for him alone that I mourn and groan, since now the gods have wrought me other evil cares. For all the noblest who hold sway over the islands —
Word by word
The setting
The lament closes on the vanished father and turns outward: Telemachus grieves not only for Odysseus but for the siege on his house — and names, as the sentence runs on, the island nobles behind it.
A note on this passage
The lament closes on the father and immediately turns from him. Odysseus is gone — unseen and unheard of, a man with neither body nor news — and he has left his son nothing but pain. But Telemachus checks himself: it is not for his father alone that he grieves. The gods have made him other troubles too.
Here the speech pivots from the missing man to the present siege, and the sentence runs off its own edge: ‘for all the noblest who hold sway over the islands—.’ Grief becomes politics in a single breath. The ‘other evil cares’ are the suitors, and the unfinished line leans into the roll-call of their homelands that follows. The paired words ἄιστος and ἄπυστος — no sight of him, no word of him — seal the erasure the whole speech has circled: a father who cannot be mourned properly because he cannot even be confirmed dead.
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