Odyssey 4.211 · Book 4, lines 211–215
Enough weeping — back to the feast
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Menelaus — υἱέας αὖ πινυτούς τε καὶ ἔγχεσιν εἶναι ἀρίστους. ἡμεῖς δὲ κλαυθμὸν μὲν ἐάσομεν, ὃς πρὶν ἐτύχθη, δόρπου δʼ ἐξαῦτις μνησώμεθα, χερσὶ δʼ ἐφʼ ὕδωρ χευάντων. μῦθοι δὲ καὶ ἠῶθέν περ ἔσονται Τηλεμάχῳ καὶ ἐμοὶ διαειπέμεν ἀλλήλοισιν.
May his sons be prudent too, and the best with the spear. But we will let go the weeping that arose before, and let us think again of supper; let them pour water over our hands. There will be tales even at dawn, for Telemachus and me to tell to one another.
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The setting
Menelaus, hosting Telemachus at Sparta, has been recalling the war and its dead, and the whole company has fallen to weeping. He now breaks off to restore the feast.
A note on this passage
Menelaus closes a wave of shared mourning. The company has been weeping over the dead of Troy; the host calls them back to the ordinary rite — leave the grief, wash the hands, take supper — and puts off the telling of tales until dawn. It is the plain work of a host: sorrow managed so the feast can go on.
The restraint here is what the next lines undo. Menelaus would postpone the painful stories; Helen will instead reach for a drug that lets them be told at once, without tears. The poem sets his deferral against her intervention — two ways of handling a table full of unbearable memory.
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