Odyssey 10.496 · Book 10, lines 496–498
My heart broke at the word
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ὣς ἔφατʼ, αὐτὰρ ἐμοί γε κατεκλάσθη φίλον ἦτορ· κλαῖον δʼ ἐν λεχέεσσι καθήμενος, οὐδέ νύ μοι κῆρ ἤθελʼ ἔτι ζώειν καὶ ὁρᾶν φάος ἠελίοιο.
So she spoke, but my dear heart was broken; I wept, sitting on the bed, nor did my heart any longer wish to live and see the light of the sun.
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus's reaction to hearing where he must go. The bare command to sail to the dead lands on him as a blow, and he breaks down on the spot.
A note on this passage
The man who kept his head against the Cyclops and the Laestrygonians simply breaks. He sits on the bed and weeps, and for a moment does not want to go on living at all. The journey to the dead frightens him more than any monster has.
The phrase for despair is exact and Greek: he no longer wished "to see the light of the sun." To be alive, in Homer, is to see the sunlight; to wish that away is to wish yourself already among the shadows Circe has just described. His grief takes the very shape of the place he has been ordered to enter, as if the sentence had half-sent him there already.
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