Odyssey 4.227 · Book 4, lines 227–232
Egypt, where good drugs and deadly grow
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τοῖα Διὸς θυγάτηρ ἔχε φάρμακα μητιόεντα, ἐσθλά, τά οἱ Πολύδαμνα πόρεν, Θῶνος παράκοιτις Αἰγυπτίη, τῇ πλεῖστα φέρει ζείδωρος ἄρουρα φάρμακα, πολλὰ μὲν ἐσθλὰ μεμιγμένα πολλὰ δὲ λυγρά· ἰητρὸς δὲ ἕκαστος ἐπιστάμενος περὶ πάντων ἀνθρώπων· ἦ γὰρ Παιήονός εἰσι γενέθλης.
Such cunning drugs the daughter of Zeus had, good ones, which Polydamna gave her, the wife of Thon, an Egyptian woman, where the grain-giving earth bears the most drugs — many good ones mixed, and many baneful; and each man there is a physician skilled beyond all others, for they are of the race of Paeon.
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The setting
Having described the drug's effect, the poet tells where it came from: Egypt, and the woman who gave it to Helen.
A note on this passage
The poet traces the drug to Egypt. Helen had it from Polydamna, wife of Thon; Egypt's soil, he says, grows more drugs than any land, good and deadly together, and every Egyptian is a master healer, sprung from Paeon, physician of the gods.
Egypt here is the land of pharmaka — of knowledge too deep and too double to be simply good. The same rich earth yields the healing and the poison, and the poem quietly plants what it will later harvest: Menelaus's own long detour through Egypt, and the sense that Helen's strange power is borrowed from an older, wealthier world than Sparta's.
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