Odyssey 2.325 · Book 2, lines 325–330
He means to poison us all
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A suitor — ἦ μάλα Τηλέμαχος φόνον ἡμῖν μερμηρίζει. ἤ τινας ἐκ Πύλου ἄξει ἀμύντορας ἠμαθόεντος; ἢ ὅ γε καὶ Σπάρτηθεν ἐπεί νύ περ ἵεται αἰνῶς;· ἠὲ καὶ εἰς Ἐφύρην ἐθέλει πίειραν ἄρουραν, ἐλθεῖν ὄφρʼ ἔνθεν θυμοφθόρα φάρμακʼ ἐνείκῃ, ἐν δὲ βάλῃ κρητῆρι καὶ ἡμέας πάντας ὀλέσσῃ.
Surely Telemachus is plotting murder for us. Either he will bring some avengers from Pylos, the sandy land, or that man even from Sparta, since indeed he strives terribly for it now; or he even wishes to go to Ephyra, that fertile soil, so that from there he may fetch deadly poisons, and cast them in the mixing-bowl, and destroy every one of us.
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The setting
One of the suitors, mocking, spins out what Telemachus's threat must mean: he will fetch fighting-men from Pylos or Sparta, or poison from Ephyra, to kill them all at the feast.
A note on this passage
The jeer runs the boy's threat to absurdity. He must mean to import avengers from Pylos or Sparta, or to sail to Ephyra for poison and drop it in the wine-bowl to kill them all at a stroke. It is contemptuous fantasy, meant to shrink him.
But it is dramatic irony at full pitch. They laugh at the picture of their own destruction — which the poem has already promised in plain words. Ephyra as the poison-source is a real thread: Odysseus went there for arrow-venom (1.259–262). And ‘murder in the mixing-bowl’ inverts the feast itself — the δαίς they pervert becomes the very image of how they will die. The suitors name their own fate and find it funny.
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