Odyssey 1.59 · Book 1, lines 59–62
Why so wroth at Odysseus, Zeus?
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ἧς γαίης, θανέειν ἱμείρεται. οὐδέ νυ σοί περ ἐντρέπεται φίλον ἦτορ, Ὀλύμπιε. οὔ νύ τʼ Ὀδυσσεὺς Ἀργείων παρὰ νηυσὶ χαρίζετο ἱερὰ ῥέζων Τροίῃ ἐν εὐρείῃ; τί νύ οἱ τόσον ὠδύσαο, Ζεῦ;
of his own land, he longs to die. And not even now does your own heart stir with care, Olympian? Did not Odysseus then, please you, offering sacrifice by the Argive ships in wide Troy? Why now are you so wroth at him, Zeus?
Word by word
The setting
Athena closes her plea. The sentence carries over from the last unit — Odysseus, longing to see the smoke of home, would gladly die. She turns it into a direct reproach of Zeus, invoking the sacrifices Odysseus made at Troy, and ends on the pun that generates the hero's very name.
A note on this passage
Athena's lament sharpens into reproach. Odysseus is so worn down that he would rather die if he could just glimpse his home first — and does Zeus's own heart not care at all? Did Odysseus not always honour the gods, offering sacrifice by the ships at Troy? Then why is Zeus so set against him?
The last line is the poem naming its own hero. ὠδύσαο — ‘why are you so wroth?’ — is built from the same sounds as Ὀδυσσεύς, and Homer means the pun: Odysseus is the man a god is angry at, the name made from the wrath aimed his way (as the poem states outright at 1.62 and again at 19.407). Athena wields the etymology as a rhetorical hook — ‘why do you Odysseus him so, Zeus?’ — turning the hero's very name into her argument, and quietly reminding the council that the wrath is Poseidon's, not the king's, to nurse.
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