Odyssey 1.265 · Book 1, lines 265–266
‘Swift-fated and bitterly wed’
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τοῖος ἐὼν μνηστῆρσιν ὁμιλήσειεν Ὀδυσσεύς· πάντες κʼ ὠκύμοροί τε γενοίατο πικρόγαμοί τε.
Being such a man, may Odysseus come among the suitors — then all of them would become swift-fated and bitterly wed.
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The setting
Athena closes the wish where it began: with Odysseus, armed and formidable, meeting the suitors. She names, for the first time in Book 1, the death that hangs over them.
A note on this passage
Athena closes the wish where she began it: with the armed Odysseus, ‘such a man’ as the fighter of the Ephyra memory, set loose among the suitors. The optative is a curse in the shape of a prayer — let them all die quickly, their courtship turned to grief.
The coinage πικρόγαμοι does the work. The suitors came to make a marriage; the word makes the marriage their ruin — ‘bitter’ welded onto ‘wedding’ into a single doom-name, hung on men who do not yet know they are dead. It is the poem's judgment spoken as grammar, and the first moment in Book 1 that anyone pictures the slaughter the whole story is bending toward.
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