Odyssey 4.379 · Book 4, lines 379–381
'You tell me — for the gods know everything'
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Menelaus — ἀλλὰ σύ πέρ μοι εἰπέ, θεοὶ δέ τε πάντα ἴσασιν, ὅς τίς μʼ ἀθανάτων πεδάᾳ καὶ ἔδησε κελεύθου, νόστον θʼ, ὡς ἐπὶ πόντον ἐλεύσομαι ἰχθυόεντα.
But you, at least, tell me — for the gods know all things — which of the immortals shackles me and has bound me from my way, and my homecoming, how I shall cross the fishy sea.
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Menelaus finishes his reply by throwing the question back to the goddess: since gods know all, let her say which of them has trapped him, and how he can get home.
A note on this passage
Menelaus turns his defense into a request. If he is trapped by some offended god, he cannot fix it without knowing which god and how — so he asks the one being present who might know. The appeal rests on a flat theological premise stated as fact: the gods know everything.
The language is that of a prisoner. He speaks of being fettered and bound from his path, as if his stalled journey were a literal chain. And the thing he most wants named is his νόστος, his homecoming — the word the whole poem turns on. Menelaus's small Egyptian ordeal rehearses in miniature the master-plot of the Odyssey: a man cut off from home, needing knowledge he does not have to win a return the sea keeps denying him.
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