Odyssey 4.222 · Book 4, lines 222–226
No tear, though his own kin were killed
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ὃς τὸ καταβρόξειεν, ἐπὴν κρητῆρι μιγείη, οὔ κεν ἐφημέριός γε βάλοι κατὰ δάκρυ παρειῶν, οὐδʼ εἴ οἱ κατατεθναίη μήτηρ τε πατήρ τε, οὐδʼ εἴ οἱ προπάροιθεν ἀδελφεὸν ἢ φίλον υἱὸν χαλκῷ δηιόῳεν, ὁ δʼ ὀφθαλμοῖσιν ὁρῷτο.
Whoever swallowed it, mixed in the bowl, would shed no tear down his cheeks that whole day — not even if his mother and father should die, not even if, before him, they cut down his brother or dear son with the bronze, and he looked on with his own eyes.
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The setting
Helen has cast a drug into the wine. The poet now pauses to describe its power over the drinker.
A note on this passage
Homer measures the drug by a horror. A man who drank it would not let a single tear fall for a whole day — not if his mother and father died, not if he watched his own brother or son hacked down with the bronze before his eyes. The hyperbole fixes nepenthe's power: it does not soothe grief, it abolishes it.
That is more unsettling than it first sounds. In Homer, grief is what binds kin to kin and pays the dead their due; a man who feels nothing at a brother's murder has lost something human, not just something painful. The drug's mercy and its monstrousness are the same act — and it is Helen who pours it.
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