Odyssey 4.541 · Book 4, lines 541–542
The old sea-god breaks the weeping
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αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ κλαίων τε κυλινδόμενός τε κορέσθην, δὴ τότε με προσέειπε γέρων ἅλιος νημερτής·
But when I had my fill of weeping and writhing, then at last the unerring old sea-god spoke to me:
Word by word
The setting
Menelaus is telling Telemachus of his own delayed homecoming, pinned in Egypt, where he wrestled Proteus, the shape-shifting Old Man of the Sea, and forced from him the fates of the returning Greeks. Here Menelaus, undone by what he has heard, weeps on the shore until the god himself stops him.
A note on this passage
A hinge line. Menelaus has just learned how his brother Agamemnon died, and he collapses into grief on the sand. It is the god, not a man, who calls a halt — the unerring one who cannot lie, and so cannot comfort with a kindly falsehood either.
The standing epithet does quiet work. ἅλιος νημερτής, ‘the sea's unerring one,’ marks Proteus as a truth-teller by nature. What follows will be hard truth, delivered without softening: the reader is told, before the speech, that every word of it is to be trusted.
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