Odyssey 2.74 · Book 2, lines 74–76
Better you had eaten it yourselves
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τούτους ὀτρύνοντες. ἐμοὶ δέ κε κέρδιον εἴη ὑμέας ἐσθέμεναι κειμήλιά τε πρόβασίν τε. εἴ χʼ ὑμεῖς γε φάγοιτε, τάχʼ ἄν ποτε καὶ τίσις εἴη·
urging these men on. For me it would be more profitable that you devour my treasures and flocks. If indeed you yourselves were the ones to eat them, soon some day there might even be recompense;
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The setting
Telemachus makes a strange, bitter concession. It would be less painful, he says, if the suitors simply devoured his household goods outright — because then he could sue them, and one day get repayment. As it is, the loss is hopeless.
A note on this passage
The logic is grim bookkeeping. Open theft would at least be a claimable debt: eat my property, and there is a case to press, a τίσις, a repayment I might one day win. What galls is that the current arrangement gives him no such recourse.
The key word is τίσις — requital, the debt of justice paid back in full. It is the engine-word of the whole poem: the suitors' eventual slaughter is one long τίσις. Here Telemachus can only wish for its lawful, small form — a court judgment — because he has no power to exact the other kind. The reader, who knows what is coming, hears the larger reckoning inside the smaller wish.
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