Odyssey 4.318 · Book 4, lines 318–321
The house being devoured
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ἐσθίεταί μοι οἶκος, ὄλωλε δὲ πίονα ἔργα, δυσμενέων δʼ ἀνδρῶν πλεῖος δόμος, οἵ τέ μοι αἰεὶ μῆλʼ ἁδινὰ σφάζουσι καὶ εἰλίποδας ἕλικας βοῦς, μητρὸς ἐμῆς μνηστῆρες ὑπέρβιον ὕβριν ἔχοντες.
My house is being eaten up, and my rich fields are ruined; the house is full of hostile men, who are forever slaughtering my thronging sheep and shambling, crook-horned cattle, the suitors of my mother, holding overweening insolence.
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The setting
Telemachus explains the ruin driving his search. In Odysseus's absence the suitors of Penelope have overrun the palace, killing off its flocks and herds day after day as they press their courtship.
A note on this passage
The plain economics of the crisis. The suitors are not just rude guests; they are eating the estate to death, slaughtering flocks and herds daily while the master is gone. Telemachus lists it as damage — house consumed, fields wasted, livestock butchered — the concrete wealth of a Homeric household bleeding away.
The verb does the work: the house "is being eaten," a passive that makes the home itself the victim, chewed like a carcass. The suitors' crime is framed as a violation of xenia turned inside out — guests who devour a host instead of honoring him. It is the exact mirror of Menelaus's hall, where a stranger is fed with open hands; and it names the wrong the whole poem is bending toward setting right.
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