Odyssey 4.495 · Book 4, lines 495–498
Two lost, one still at sea
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πολλοὶ μὲν γὰρ τῶν γε δάμεν, πολλοὶ δὲ λίποντο· ἀρχοὶ δʼ αὖ δύο μοῦνοι Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων ἐν νόστῳ ἀπόλοντο· μάχῃ δέ τε καὶ σὺ παρῆσθα. εἷς δʼ ἔτι που ζωὸς κατερύκεται εὐρέι πόντῳ.
For many of them were slain, and many were left; but two leaders alone of the bronze-clad Achaeans perished on the return — and at the fighting you too were there. And one still, somewhere, alive, is held back on the wide sea.
Word by word
The setting
Proteus gives the shape of his answer before the details. Of the Greek host, many died at Troy and many survived; but among the leaders, only two were lost on the journey home — and one is still alive, kept far off on the sea.
A note on this passage
The god sorts the army. Many fell in the fighting, many lived; of the captains, just two died on the nostos itself. And one, he says, is still alive, held somewhere on the wide sea. Menelaus was at the battles himself — the god reminds him of it.
The undercurrent runs past Menelaus to the boy hearing the story. ‘One is still alive, held on the wide sea’ — that one is Odysseus, and Telemachus, seated in the Spartan hall, is listening to a sea-god's word that his father lives. The roll of the drowned is really the frame for the single name that keeps the whole poem in motion: the man not yet home, not yet dead.
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