Odyssey 10.535 · Book 10, lines 535–537
The sword over the blood
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αὐτὸς δὲ ξίφος ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ ἧσθαι, μηδὲ ἐᾶν νεκύων ἀμενηνὰ κάρηνα αἵματος ἆσσον ἴμεν, πρὶν Τειρεσίαο πυθέσθαι.
But you yourself, drawing your sharp sword from beside your thigh, sit there, and do not let the strengthless heads of the dead come nearer the blood, before you have inquired of Teiresias.
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The setting
The sharpest instruction of the rite: Odysseus must hold the crowding dead back from the blood with drawn sword until Teiresias has spoken.
A note on this passage
Now the tensest order. Sword drawn, Odysseus is to sit and keep the powerless dead back from the blood until he has questioned Teiresias.
The drawn blade against bloodless ghosts is the scene's strange charge. The dead crave the blood that will briefly let them speak, and they must be fended off with iron. The living man rations the one thing that gives the dead a voice, holding back a whole crowd of the departed so that the one seer he came for may drink, and answer, first. Power in Hades is simply who controls the blood.
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