Odyssey 4.178 · Book 4, lines 178–180
Until the black cloud of death
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καί κε θάμʼ ἐνθάδʼ ἐόντες ἐμισγόμεθʼ· οὐδέ κεν ἡμέας ἄλλο διέκρινεν φιλέοντέ τε τερπομένω τε, πρίν γʼ ὅτε δὴ θανάτοιο μέλαν νέφος ἀμφεκάλυψεν.
And often here, as we lived, we would have met; and nothing else would have parted us, loving and delighting in each other, until at last, when the black cloud of death wrapped us round.
Word by word
The setting
Menelaus finishes the vision of the life he and Odysseus never got to share as neighbors in Argos: constant company, unbroken friendship, parted by nothing at all — until death itself, at the very end, should close over them.
A note on this passage
The dream reaches its limit and names it. Living so near, the two friends would have met constantly, and nothing would ever have divided them — nothing, that is, but the one thing that divides everyone. The sentence lets the happiness run on and on, then stops it dead against the only barrier no friendship crosses.
The undercurrent is the black cloud itself. Homer's image for dying is a darkness that folds over a man from all sides, ἀμφεκάλυψεν, enwrapping him like the cloak Telemachus raised a few lines earlier to hide his tears. The whole tender fantasy has been unreal from the start — 'would have,' 'if' — and this is where it dissolves: even the imagined life ends where the real one does, under the same closing dark.
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