Odyssey 1.287 · Book 1, lines 287–292
If he lives, wait; if he is dead, bury him and give the mother away
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εἰ μέν κεν πατρὸς βίοτον καὶ νόστον ἀκούσῃς, ἦ τʼ ἂν τρυχόμενός περ ἔτι τλαίης ἐνιαυτόν· εἰ δέ κε τεθνηῶτος ἀκούσῃς μηδʼ ἔτʼ ἐόντος, νοστήσας δὴ ἔπειτα φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν σῆμά τέ οἱ χεῦαι καὶ ἐπὶ κτέρεα κτερεΐξαι πολλὰ μάλʼ, ὅσσα ἔοικε, καὶ ἀνέρι μητέρα δοῦναι.
If you should hear your father's life and homecoming, then, worn as you are, you could still hold out a year; but if you hear he is dead and no longer living, then afterward return to your dear native land, heap a mound for him and pay him full funeral honors, very many, as are his due, and give your mother to a husband.
Word by word
The setting
Mentes sets out the two outcomes of the search. Either Telemachus hears his father is alive and coming — and can endure another year — or he hears he is dead, and must go home, raise a tomb, perform the rites, and see his mother remarried.
A note on this passage
The advice branches cleanly. Word that Odysseus lives buys one more year of endurance; word that he is dead ends the waiting and starts the duties of a son — the homeward journey, the grave-mound, the full funeral honors, and the release of the mother into a new marriage.
The telling detail is the tomb. There would be no body to bury — a man lost overseas — so the σῆμα Mentes describes is an empty mound, a cenotaph, the rite Greeks kept when the sea held the dead. It is the exact closure the poem is built to withhold: Odysseus is neither safely home nor decently buried, and the household is frozen in the gap between the two.
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