Odyssey 2.241 · Book 2, line 241
Mentor's last word: few against many
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παύρους μνηστῆρας καταπαύετε πολλοὶ ἐόντες.
Restrain the suitors, few as they are, since you are many.
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The setting
Mentor, an old friend of Odysseus, has been rebuking the Ithacan assembly for sitting silent while a handful of suitors devour the house. This is the closing line of his speech.
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Mentor closes his rebuke with an arithmetic of shame: the suitors are few, the townsmen many, and still the many do nothing. He is not so much asking the assembly to fight as forcing it to feel the size of its own inaction.
The undercurrent is that the appeal fails. Homer has Mentor state the plain lever of power — numbers — precisely so the next speaker can knock it aside. The people of Ithaca will not move for Telemachus; the household must be saved, if at all, by the household and the gods, not by the town.
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