Odyssey 4.241 · Book 4, lines 241–243
One deed among all his trials
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ὅσσοι Ὀδυσσῆος ταλασίφρονός εἰσιν ἄεθλοι· ἀλλʼ οἷον τόδʼ ἔρεξε καὶ ἔτλη καρτερὸς ἀνὴρ δήμῳ ἔνι Τρώων, ὅθι πάσχετε πήματʼ Ἀχαιοί.
— all the exploits that there are of enduring Odysseus. But what a thing this mighty man did and endured in the land of the Trojans, where you Achaeans were suffering woes.
Word by word
The setting
Helen is telling the guests a story of Odysseus at Troy. She has just said she could not number all his exploits; now she picks out one. The Achaeans she addresses are the Greeks who besieged Troy — Menelaus and, in memory, the whole army.
A note on this passage
Helen frames a single episode against the mass of everything Odysseus did. She cannot tell it all, so she chooses one deed — the mark of a good storyteller, and of a court where telling stories is itself the evening's work. The fixed epithet ‘enduring’ arrives before the deed that will prove it.
The quiet strain is in who is speaking. Helen, over whom the whole war was fought, tells the war's veterans a war story in which she helped their spy. The address ‘where you Achaeans suffered’ keeps the pain present in the room, and lets her place herself, delicately, on the Greek side of a grief she caused.
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