Odyssey 4.277 · Book 4, lines 277–279
Calling the men in the voices of their wives
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τρὶς δὲ περίστειξας κοῖλον λόχον ἀμφαφόωσα, ἐκ δʼ ὀνομακλήδην Δαναῶν ὀνόμαζες ἀρίστους, πάντων Ἀργείων φωνὴν ἴσκουσʼ ἀλόχοισιν.
Three times you circled the hollow ambush, feeling all round it, and called out by name the best of the Danaans, likening your voice to the wives of all the Argives.
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The setting
Helen has come out to the wooden horse. Menelaus describes what she did: she walked around it, calling to the hidden Achaeans, each in the voice of his own wife back home.
A note on this passage
This is the temptation. Helen circles the horse three times, running her hands over it, and calls the buried men by name — and to each she throws back the voice of his own wife. A man who has not seen home in ten years hears, from just outside the timber, the exact sound of the woman he left.
The cruelty of it is precise. She does not attack the trick; she works on the longing that the trick depends on suppressing. Helen's gift all through Book 4 is mimicry and disguise — the same doubleness as the drug she pours — and here it is turned as a weapon against the very men come to reclaim her.
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