Odyssey 2.323 · Book 2, lines 323–324
The young men jeer
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οἱ δʼ ἐπελώβευον καὶ ἐκερτόμεον ἐπέεσσιν. ὧδε δέ τις εἴπεσκε νέων ὑπερηνορεόντων·
And they jeered and taunted him with words. And thus one of the overbearing youths would speak:
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The setting
With Telemachus's defiance hanging in the air, the suitors drop even Antinous's mock-courtesy and turn to open ridicule. The poem sets up the next voice as a nameless one from the crowd.
A note on this passage
A short bridge. The suitors move from Antinous's false-friendly needling to plain mockery, jeering and taunting the boy who has just threatened them.
Two touches do the work. The verb εἴπεσκε is iterative — ‘one would keep saying’ — and the speaker is τις, ‘someone,’ nobody named. Together they make a chorus, not a character: this is the sound of the mob. And the epithet ὑπερηνορεόντων, ‘overbearing,’ literally ‘over-manly,’ marks the ὕβρις the poem is quietly building its case on — the case Zeus opened Book 1 by stating, that men bring ruin on themselves.
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