Odyssey 4.100 · Book 4, lines 100–103
The rhythm of a mourner
Read the full text in our reader
ἀλλʼ ἔμπης πάντας μὲν ὀδυρόμενος καὶ ἀχεύων πολλάκις ἐν μεγάροισι καθήμενος ἡμετέροισιν ἄλλοτε μέν τε γόῳ φρένα τέρπομαι, ἄλλοτε δʼ αὖτε παύομαι· αἰψηρὸς δὲ κόρος κρυεροῖο γόοιο.
But nevertheless, mourning and grieving for them all, often sitting in our halls, at one time I ease my heart with lament, and at another again I cease; for swift comes the satiety of chilling lament.
Word by word
The setting
Menelaus describes how he lives with his losses — the daily cycle of a grief that cannot run without end.
A note on this passage
He tells the truth about grief's rhythm. Some days he gives his heart over to weeping; other days he stops, because even sorrow wears itself out. The chill of lament, he says, soon reaches its fill.
This is one of the poem's plainest sayings about mourning: that grief has a satiety, a point past which the body will not go. It is not offered as consolation but as observation — the same steady, unsentimental look at feeling that the Odyssey keeps turning on its grieving households.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 4.100 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 4.100 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/4.100/