Odyssey 1.253 · Book 1, lines 253–254
‘You have great need of Odysseus’
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Athena (as Mentes) — ὢ πόποι, ἦ δὴ πολλὸν ἀποιχομένου Ὀδυσῆος δεύῃ;, ὅ κε μνηστῆρσιν ἀναιδέσι χεῖρας ἐφείη.
Ah, alas! Truly you have great need of Odysseus, now long gone — who would lay his hands on the shameless suitors.
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The setting
Athena — as the guest Mentes — begins her reply. Her opening is a cry and a wish: that the absent Odysseus were here to deal with the intruders by force.
A note on this passage
The goddess's first words are a cry — ὢ πόποι — and then a diagnosis: what this house lacks is Odysseus himself. She pictures the absent man doing the one thing his absence has made impossible: putting his hands on the intruders.
She does not comfort; she sharpens the wound. Naming the lack is her method all through Book 1 — she will not soothe Telemachus but make him feel the exact shape of the missing father. And the key charge is ἀναιδέσι, ‘shameless.’ The suitors' offence is not appetite but the breaking of αἰδώς, the mutual restraint that binds guest to host. Odysseus's return is imagined first as a pair of hands laid on men who have forgotten it.
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