Odyssey 4.551 · Book 4, lines 551–553
Name me the third man
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Menelaus — τούτους μὲν δὴ οἶδα· σὺ δὲ τρίτον ἄνδρʼ ὀνόμαζε, ὅς τις ἔτι ζωὸς κατερύκεται εὐρέι πόντῳ ἠὲ θανών· ἐθέλω δὲ καὶ ἀχνύμενός περ ἀκοῦσαι.
These two I know surely; but name me the third man, whoever still alive is held back on the wide sea, or is dead; and I wish to hear it, grieved though I shall be.
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The setting
Proteus has already named two of the Greek leaders lost on the way home — Ajax the Locrian, drowned, and Agamemnon, murdered. Menelaus now asks after a third, unnamed here but known to the reader: Odysseus.
A note on this passage
Menelaus braces himself and asks. He already knows the fates of the first two leaders; now he wants the third, alive or dead, and says plainly that he will grieve either way. It is a brave request — the willingness to hear the worst named aloud.
The reader knows the answer he does not: the third man is Odysseus, the hero of the poem we are inside. For one moment the whole Odyssey narrows to a question asked by another man on a foreign beach — is he alive? The poem lets its own protagonist be, for Menelaus, only a rumor whose ending is still unknown.
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