Odyssey 4.174 · Book 4, lines 174–177
A city emptied to make him a home
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καί κέ οἱ Ἄργεϊ νάσσα πόλιν καὶ δώματʼ ἔτευξα, ἐξ Ἰθάκης ἀγαγὼν σὺν κτήμασι καὶ τέκεϊ ᾧ καὶ πᾶσιν λαοῖσι, μίαν πόλιν ἐξαλαπάξας, αἳ περιναιετάουσιν ἀνάσσονται δʼ ἐμοὶ αὐτῷ.
And for him in Argos I would have settled a city, and built houses, bringing him from Ithaca with his goods and his own child and all his people, emptying one city, which lie round about, and are ruled by me myself.
Word by word
The setting
Menelaus spells out the reward he had imagined: he would have moved Odysseus and his whole household from Ithaca and given him a city of his own in Argos, clearing one of the towns Menelaus rules so the two friends could live as neighbors.
A note on this passage
The daydream turns concrete and startling. Menelaus would have emptied one of his own subject towns to hand Odysseus a ready-made city, transplanting the whole of Ithaca — family, goods, and people — into Argos so his friend could live next door. The generosity is real, and so is its royal high-handedness: a king who can clear a town for a gift.
The undercurrent is everything the plan overlooks. Odysseus's entire story is the refusal of any home but Ithaca; the small rock he will choose over Calypso's immortality could never be swapped for a fine Argive city. Menelaus, secure and wealthy, measures love in resettlement — while the man he would relocate is, at that very moment, dying to get back to the one place this scheme would erase.
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