Odyssey 4.322 · Book 4, lines 322–325
Telemachus clasps the king's knees
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τοὔνεκα νῦν τὰ σὰ γούναθʼ ἱκάνομαι, αἴ κʼ ἐθέλῃσθα κείνου λυγρὸν ὄλεθρον ἐνισπεῖν, εἴ που ὄπωπας ὀφθαλμοῖσι τεοῖσιν ἢ ἄλλου μῦθον ἄκουσας πλαζομένου· περὶ γάρ μιν ὀιζυρὸν τέκε μήτηρ.
Therefore now I come to your knees, if you would be willing to tell of his grievous death, if perhaps you saw it with your own eyes, or heard the tale of another, of him wandering; for beyond measure his mother bore him to woe.
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The setting
Telemachus makes his appeal formal, taking the posture of a suppliant. He asks Menelaus to tell whatever he knows of Odysseus's fate — seen firsthand or heard from another — closing on the thought that his father was born to suffering.
A note on this passage
The request becomes a supplication. "I come to your knees" is the gesture of the suppliant, the strongest claim one Greek can make on another, and Telemachus makes it to hear the worst — his father's "grievous death," from eyewitness or hearsay alike. He is braced to be told Odysseus is gone.
The closing line turns from fact to fate: "beyond measure his mother bore him to woe." It is not blame but an old way of seeing a life — as if suffering were assigned at birth, spun in with the thread. The son reaches for it to explain a father he barely remembers: a man, he has decided, simply born to be the sea's and the world's long victim.
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