Odyssey 4.538 · Book 4, lines 538–540
Menelaus's heart breaks at the telling
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Menelaus — ὣς ἔφατʼ, αὐτὰρ ἐμοί γε κατεκλάσθη φίλον ἦτορ, κλαῖον δʼ ἐν ψαμάθοισι καθήμενος, οὐδέ νύ μοι κῆρ ἤθελʼ ἔτι ζώειν καὶ ὁρᾶν φάος ἠελίοιο.
So he spoke; but as for me, my own heart was broken, and I wept, sitting in the sands; nor did my heart wish any longer to live and to see the light of the sun.
Word by word
The setting
Proteus's report ends. Menelaus himself, speaking to Telemachus, remembers how the news of his brother's murder undid him on the shore of Egypt.
A note on this passage
Proteus's report is over, and Homer cuts back to the man telling it. Menelaus, recounting all this to Telemachus in Sparta, is undone again by his own story: he remembers sinking down in the Egyptian sand, weeping, no longer wishing to live.
‘To see the light of the sun’ is Homer's ordinary phrase for being alive, and Menelaus says his heart no longer wanted it. The grief doubles across the frame: the host breaks down retelling a brother's murder while his young guest sits listening for word of his own lost father. Both men mourn an absent man at the same table — and neither yet knows that Telemachus's father, unlike Menelaus's brother, is still alive.
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