Odyssey 4.367 · Book 4, lines 367–369
Met while wandering, hollow with hunger
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ἥ μʼ οἴῳ ἔρροντι συνήντετο νόσφιν ἑταίρων· αἰεὶ γὰρ περὶ νῆσον ἀλώμενοι ἰχθυάασκον γναμπτοῖς ἀγκίστροισιν, ἔτειρε δὲ γαστέρα λιμός.
She met me as I wandered alone, apart from my companions; for they roamed always around the island, fishing with bent hooks, and hunger wore at their belly.
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The setting
Menelaus explains how the goddess came upon him: he had strayed off alone from his crew, who were reduced to fishing the shore with hooks to stave off starvation.
A note on this passage
The picture is deliberately unheroic. The king of Sparta has drifted off by himself, and his famous warriors are scattered along the beach bending over hooks like any hungry fishermen. Homer lets the epic scale collapse to a single physical fact: the belly, worn thin by hunger.
That detail matters in the Odyssey, a poem obsessed with the belly's demands — the appetite that drives men to beg, steal, and take terrible risks. Here it is hunger, not glory, that has emptied Menelaus's company and left him alone on the sand at the moment a goddess appears. The greatest of the returning kings is reduced to the body's plainest need, and it is in that reduced state that help finds him.
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