Odyssey 1.246 · Book 1, lines 246–248
The islands' catalogue — courting and consuming
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Δουλιχίῳ τε Σάμῃ τε καὶ ὑλήεντι Ζακύνθῳ, ἠδʼ ὅσσοι κραναὴν Ἰθάκην κάτα κοιρανέουσιν, τόσσοι μητέρʼ ἐμὴν μνῶνται, τρύχουσι δὲ οἶκον.
Dulichium and Same and wooded Zacynthus, and all who hold sway throughout rugged Ithaca — so many woo my mother, and they wear down the house.
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The setting
Telemachus, host to the disguised Athena, has been describing the suitors besieging his home. Here he finishes the catalogue of where they come from — the neighbouring islands and Ithaca itself — and names what they are doing to his household.
A note on this passage
Telemachus finishes naming where the suitors come from: the neighbouring islands — Dulichium, Same, Zacynthus — and Ithaca itself. Then, in one breath, he states their two crimes together: they court his mother and they eat the estate.
The wooing and the wasting are a single act. τρύχουσι, ‘wear down,’ is the word for grinding a thing slowly to nothing; the courtship is conducted as a consumption of the larder. And the catalogue quietly measures the scale of it — this is not a rival or two but the assembled young nobility of a whole region, camped on one widow's stores. A marriage-suit that is also a siege.
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