Odyssey 4.181 · Book 4, lines 181–183
A god's grudge, and grief breaks loose
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ἀλλὰ τὰ μέν που μέλλεν ἀγάσσεσθαι θεὸς αὐτός, ὃς κεῖνον δύστηνον ἀνόστιμον οἶον ἔθηκεν. ὣς φάτο, τοῖσι δὲ πᾶσιν ὑφʼ ἵμερον ὦρσε γόοιο.
But some god himself must have begrudged this, who made that man wretched, without return, and alone. So he spoke, and in them all he stirred up desire for lamentation.
Word by word
The setting
Menelaus has just wished aloud that Odysseus had come home to settle near him in Argos, so the two could have grown old as neighbors. Here he closes that daydream — some god must have envied it — and his words set the whole hall weeping.
A note on this passage
Menelaus caps his wish for a neighborly old age with Odysseus by handing the blame upward: a god envied the plan and left the man wretched, homeless, and cut off. The three adjectives — wretched, without return, alone — land in a row, and the last word before the full stop, alone, is the one that stings. Then the narrator turns the speech into an event: it makes everyone in the room want to weep.
The key word is ἀνόστιμος, ‘without return.’ Built as the negative of νόστος — the homecoming that is this whole poem's engine — it names Odysseus by the one thing the story exists to undo. Menelaus, safely home, defines his friend purely by the lack of what Menelaus has.
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