Odyssey 10.112 · Book 10, lines 112–115
The mountain-tall wife
Read the full text in our reader
οἱ δʼ ἐπεὶ εἰσῆλθον κλυτὰ δώματα, τὴν δὲ γυναῖκα εὗρον, ὅσην τʼ ὄρεος κορυφήν, κατὰ δʼ ἔστυγον αὐτήν. ἡ δʼ αἶψʼ ἐξ ἀγορῆς ἐκάλει κλυτὸν Ἀντιφατῆα, ὃν πόσιν, ὃς δὴ τοῖσιν ἐμήσατο λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
And they, when they entered the glorious halls, found the woman, tall as a mountain peak, and they loathed her. She at once called glorious Antiphates from the assembly, her own husband, who devised for them a wretched death.
Word by word
The setting
The scouts step into the royal hall and recoil: the king's wife is huge as a mountain peak. She calls her husband, glorious Antiphates, in from the assembly — and he, coming home, has only one plan for his guests: a hideous death.
A note on this passage
The horror arrives through scale. The scouts find not a monster at first but a wife — only she is the size of a mountain peak, and the sight alone makes them shudder. Then she does the homely thing a hostess does: she calls her husband in from the town's business.
The formulas keep working while their meaning curdles. Antiphates is ‘glorious,’ the hall is ‘glorious’ too, and the wife performs ordinary hospitality — fetch the man of the house. But the whole grammar of welcome is now a mechanism of death: the ‘glorious’ king comes home and at once ‘devises’ their ruin. Homer sets the epithets of a civilized court over a scene of cannibal ambush, and the gap does the work.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 10.112 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 10.112 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/10.112/