Odyssey 3.276 · Book 3, lines 276–280
Apollo kills the helmsman at Sunium
Read the full text in our reader
ἡμεῖς μὲν γὰρ ἅμα πλέομεν Τροίηθεν ἰόντες, Ἀτρεΐδης καὶ ἐγώ, φίλα εἰδότες ἀλλήλοισιν· ἀλλʼ ὅτε Σούνιον ἱρὸν ἀφικόμεθʼ, ἄκρον Ἀθηνέων, ἔνθα κυβερνήτην Μενελάου Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων οἷς ἀγανοῖς βελέεσσιν ἐποιχόμενος κατέπεφνε,
For we sailed together, coming from Troy, the son of Atreus and I, knowing kind thoughts toward one another; but when we reached holy Sunium, the cape of Athens, there Phoebus Apollo slew Menelaus's helmsman, assailing him with his gentle shafts.
Word by word
The setting
Nestor turns from Aegisthus to his own voyage home. He and Menelaus sailed together from Troy as friends; but rounding Cape Sunium, the headland of Attica, Apollo struck down Menelaus's steersman with the painless arrows the god sends to bring a sudden death.
A note on this passage
Nestor begins his own return. He and Menelaus set out from Troy together, on good terms, and got as far as Cape Sunium off Athens — and there Apollo killed Menelaus's helmsman. The plain event is a single unlucky death at the very start of the voyage home.
The undercurrent is in one word: the arrows are ἀγανοῖς, 'gentle.' Apollo's shafts are the Homeric image for a death that comes without disease or struggle, a man dropping suddenly at his post. The epithet is not irony but the poem's whole theology of dying well — and it plants, at the threshold of the nostos, the reminder that even a favored return is bought with losses.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 3.276 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 3.276 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/3.276/