Odyssey 3.151 · Book 3, lines 151–154
The bitter night, and the launch at dawn
Read the full text in our reader
Nestor — νύκτα μὲν ἀέσαμεν χαλεπὰ φρεσὶν ὁρμαίνοντες ἀλλήλοις· ἐπὶ γὰρ Ζεὺς ἤρτυε πῆμα κακοῖο· ἠῶθεν δʼ οἱ μὲν νέας ἕλκομεν εἰς ἅλα δῖαν κτήματά τʼ ἐντιθέμεσθα βαθυζώνους τε γυναῖκας.
That night we passed brooding hard things in our hearts against one another; for Zeus was fashioning upon us a woe of evil. And at dawn some of us hauled the ships down to the bright sea, and stowed our goods aboard, and the deep-girdled women.
Word by word
The setting
Nestor, telling Telemachus how the Greeks broke camp at Troy, picks up after the fatal quarrel of Agamemnon and Menelaus. The chiefs pass a sleepless, angry night; at first light one part of the army begins to load the ships.
A note on this passage
Nestor's memory begins in discord. The night after the assembly breaks up in anger, the chiefs lie awake brooding against one another, and Nestor sets the cause above them all: Zeus himself was fashioning their ruin. At first light the loading starts — ships dragged to the water, goods and captive women carried aboard.
The quiet weight is in the cargo. The 'deep-girdled women' are war-prizes, the human plunder of Troy, counted in among the goods; the fleet that will carry so many men to their deaths sails already freighted with the wreck of another city. Nestor does not moralize it. He is an old man telling how the trouble began, and the trouble began at home, among the Greeks, before the sea ever touched them.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 3.151 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 3.151 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/3.151/