Odyssey 1.26 · Book 1, lines 26–31
Zeus remembers Aegisthus
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ἔνθʼ ὅ γʼ ἐτέρπετο δαιτὶ παρήμενος· οἱ δὲ δὴ ἄλλοι Ζηνὸς ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν Ὀλυμπίου ἁθρόοι ἦσαν. τοῖσι δὲ μύθων ἦρχε πατὴρ ἀνδρῶν τε θεῶν τε· μνήσατο γὰρ κατὰ θυμὸν ἀμύμονος Αἰγίσθοιο, τόν ῥʼ Ἀγαμεμνονίδης τηλεκλυτὸς ἔκτανʼ Ὀρέστης· τοῦ ὅ γʼ ἐπιμνησθεὶς ἔπεʼ ἀθανάτοισι μετηύδα·
There he took his pleasure, sitting at the feast; but the other gods were gathered together in the halls of Olympian Zeus. Among them the father of men and of gods began to speak; for he remembered in his heart blameless Aegisthus, whom far-famed Orestes, Agamemnon's son, slew; and thinking back on him he spoke these words to the immortals:
Word by word
The setting
On Olympus the gods sit assembled in Zeus's halls. The father of gods and men opens the session — but his mind is on an old crime and its reckoning: Aegisthus, who seduced Agamemnon's wife and murdered the king, and was killed in turn by the king's son, Orestes.
A note on this passage
Two feasts, cut against each other: Poseidon taking his pleasure at the world's edge, and the full session of heaven convened in Zeus's hall. Then the poem's action begins — not with a storm or a sword but with an act of memory. Zeus broods on Aegisthus: the man who seduced a hero's wife while he was at Troy, murdered him at his homecoming, and died for it at the son's hands.
The undercurrent is the choice of story. Of everything in the world, the poem has Zeus remember the one tale that mirrors its own: a house corrupted in the husband's absence, a bloody return, a son who came of age by acting. Agamemnon's family is the dark twin of Odysseus's — what Ithaca could become. And there is the famous jolt of ἀμύμονος, ‘blameless’ Aegisthus: an epithet of rank draped over a man whose crime Zeus is about to condemn. The formula and the judgment grind against each other audibly.
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