Odyssey 4.247 · Book 4, lines 247–248
Disguised as a beggar
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ἄλλῳ δʼ αὐτὸν φωτὶ κατακρύπτων ἤισκε, δέκτῃ, ὃς οὐδὲν τοῖος ἔην ἐπὶ νηυσὶν Ἀχαιῶν.
And disguising himself he made himself like another man, a beggar — one who was in no way such by the ships of the Achaeans.
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The setting
Continuing the disguise: Odysseus does not merely dress down, he refashions himself into a specific figure — a beggar — utterly unlike the commander the Greeks knew back at the ships.
A note on this passage
The line sharpens the trick into a portrait. He becomes ‘another man,’ and the poem names him: a beggar, the lowest walker of roads. The last half-line measures the distance travelled — this is nothing like the man the army knew at the ships.
The undercurrent is how completely a hero can un-make himself. Homeric identity is usually fixed by epithet and rank; here Odysseus sheds both on purpose. The beggar is not a costume laid over the commander but a second, convincing person — the same doubling that later lets him sit unrecognized among the men eating his household alive.
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Odyssey 4.247 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/4.247/