Odyssey 1.376 · Book 1, lines 376–380
Devour it — and the gods will requite you
Read the full text in our reader
εἰ δʼ ὕμιν δοκέει τόδε λωίτερον καὶ ἄμεινον ἔμμεναι, ἀνδρὸς ἑνὸς βίοτον νήποινον ὀλέσθαι, κείρετʼ· ἐγὼ δὲ θεοὺς ἐπιβώσομαι αἰὲν ἐόντας, αἴ κέ ποθι Ζεὺς δῷσι παλίντιτα ἔργα γενέσθαι· νήποινοί κεν ἔπειτα δόμων ἔντοσθεν ὄλοισθε.
But if it seems to you more desirable and better that it be so — that one man's livelihood be destroyed unavenged — then devour it! But I will call on the gods that are forever, in hope that Zeus may somehow grant deeds of requital to happen: then within these halls you would perish, unavenged.
Word by word
The setting
Telemachus finishes his speech with a threat wrapped in a dare: if the suitors will not stop, let them consume his estate — but the gods, he says, will exact the payment.
A note on this passage
Telemachus ends by daring them. If wasting one man's estate without payment truly seems the better course, then let them ravage it — but he will call on the eternal gods, and pray that Zeus grant deeds of ‘requital,’ so that they die unavenged in these very halls.
The undercurrent is doom pronounced. παλίντιτα, ‘paid back,’ and νήποινος, ‘unavenged’ (said twice), are the poem's justice-vocabulary, and the boy is speaking, without fully knowing it, the sentence the proem already announced: men destroyed by their own recklessness. ‘Within these halls’ is exact. That is where the killing of Book 22 will happen — Odysseus and his son among the slaughtered suitors, in this room. Telemachus utters a prophecy and hears only his own anger.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 1.376 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 1.376 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/1.376/