Odyssey 3.145 · Book 3, lines 145–147
‘Fool’ — the gods do not turn quickly
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ὡς τὸν Ἀθηναίης δεινὸν χόλον ἐξακέσαιτο, νήπιος, οὐδὲ τὸ ᾔδη, ὃ οὐ πείσεσθαι ἔμελλεν· οὐ γάρ τʼ αἶψα θεῶν τρέπεται νόος αἰὲν ἐόντων.
so that he might appease the dread anger of Athena — fool, and he did not know this, that she would not be won over; for the mind of the gods who are forever is not quickly turned.
Word by word
The setting
Nestor judges Agamemnon's plan. Staying to sacrifice looked pious, but it could never undo, in a day, a wrath the whole army had earned.
A note on this passage
Nestor delivers his verdict on Agamemnon in one word: νήπιος, fool. The king thought a sacrifice offered on the spot could soothe Athena's terrible anger, and he did not grasp that she would not be talked round. Then comes the maxim: the mind of the everlasting gods does not change fast.
νήπιος is the poem's word for a particular blindness — the failure to see a doom already fixed. The army had earned the goddess's wrath in the sack; no same-day offering could lift it. The line looks past Troy, too: Agamemnon's real reckoning waits at home, not on this beach. Homer uses the same word of the suitors, who also feast on toward a ruin they cannot see.
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