Odyssey 3.193 · Book 3, lines 193–194
Even you have heard of Agamemnon
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Ἀτρεΐδην δὲ καὶ αὐτοὶ ἀκούετε, νόσφιν ἐόντες, ὥς τʼ ἦλθʼ, ὥς τʼ Αἴγισθος ἐμήσατο λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον.
And of Atreus' son you yourselves have heard, far away though you are — how he came home, and how Aegisthus contrived his grievous death.
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The setting
Nestor shifts from the captains who returned safely to the one whose homecoming became a catastrophe: Agamemnon, murdered by Aegisthus. He assumes the tale has reached even distant Ithaca.
A note on this passage
Nestor turns from the safe returns to the famous ruined one. Of Agamemnon, he says, even Telemachus and his companions must have heard, distant as Ithaca is: how the king came home from Troy, and how Aegisthus engineered his murder. The story is treated as common knowledge.
This is the poem's dark mirror clicking into place. The murdered king, the treacherous kinsman, the homecoming turned into a trap — it is the shadow-version of what could await Odysseus in a house full of suitors. Homer keeps returning to Agamemnon's fate so the reader will hold it beside Odysseus's, and measure the difference a loyal house makes.
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