Odyssey 4.244 · Book 4, lines 244–246
He scourges himself into disguise
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αὐτόν μιν πληγῇσιν ἀεικελίῃσι δαμάσσας, σπεῖρα κάκʼ ἀμφʼ ὤμοισι βαλών, οἰκῆι ἐοικώς, ἀνδρῶν δυσμενέων κατέδυ πόλιν εὐρυάγυιαν·
He mastered himself with degrading blows, threw wretched rags about his shoulders, and, looking like a slave, stole down into the enemy men's wide-streeted city.
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The setting
Helen describes how Odysseus got inside Troy: not by force but by self-degradation. He beats his own body, dresses as a slave, and walks in through the gates of the enemy city.
A note on this passage
The tactic is pure Odysseus: the man of many turns turns himself into a nobody. He inflicts the marks of a beaten slave on his own flesh, puts on rags, and enters the wide-streeted city not over its walls but through the front of it, unseen because beneath notice.
The undercurrent is the cost hidden inside the cunning. This is the hero who will later be a beggar in his own hall, taken for nothing by the suitors. The disguise that wins Troy and the disguise that wins Ithaca are the same trick — and both require him to become, in the eyes of others, exactly the low, despised thing an epic hero is not.
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