Odyssey 3.103 · Book 3, lines 103–108
Nestor opens the wound: both sea and city
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Nestor — ὦ φίλʼ, ἐπεί μʼ ἔμνησας ὀιζύος, ἣν ἐν ἐκείνῳ δήμῳ ἀνέτλημεν μένος ἄσχετοι υἷες Ἀχαιῶν, ἠμὲν ὅσα ξὺν νηυσὶν ἐπʼ ἠεροειδέα πόντον πλαζόμενοι κατὰ ληίδʼ, ὅπῃ ἄρξειεν Ἀχιλλεύς, ἠδʼ ὅσα καὶ περὶ ἄστυ μέγα Πριάμοιο ἄνακτος μαρνάμεθʼ· ἔνθα δʼ ἔπειτα κατέκταθεν ὅσσοι ἄριστοι.
O friend, since you have reminded me of the misery which in that land we endured, we ungovernable sons of the Achaeans, unrestrained in fury — both all that we bore with our ships over the misty sea, wandering after booty wherever Achilles led, and all that we fought around the great city of lord Priam; and there then all the best were slain.
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The setting
Nestor begins his long answer. Stirred to memory, he frames the whole war as two theaters of suffering — the roving raids by sea under Achilles, and the fighting under the walls of Troy — and ends on the plain fact that there the best men fell.
A note on this passage
Nestor takes up the memory the boy has stirred and immediately widens it. He answers a question about one man by opening the whole war, split into its two theaters: the years of sea-raiding under Achilles, and the long fight beneath the walls of Priam's city.
The undercurrent is that Nestor cannot speak of Odysseus except inside a shared catastrophe. Telemachus asked about his father; the old man replies with the death of a generation, and closes on “there the best were slain.” The line sets up the roll of the dead that follows — and, underneath it, the ache that Odysseus alone is unaccounted for, neither safely home nor safely buried.
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