Odyssey 4.554 · Book 4, lines 554–555
The son of Laertes
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ὣς ἐφάμην, ὁ δέ μʼ αὐτίκʼ ἀμειβόμενος προσέειπεν·
Proteus — υἱὸς Λαέρτεω, Ἰθάκῃ ἔνι οἰκία ναίων·
So I spoke, and at once he answered me and said: The son of Laertes, who dwells in his home in Ithaca —
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The setting
The reply formula turns the speech back to Proteus, who now answers Menelaus's question about the third man. He opens not with a name but with a lineage and a place — the son of Laertes, at home in Ithaca.
A note on this passage
A single line of speech-frame and then the god begins. He identifies Odysseus the epic way — by father and by island — rather than by name, the standard patronymic-and-home tag.
But the phrase lands with an ache. ‘Who dwells in his home in Ithaca’ is exactly what Odysseus does not do: he is nowhere near his home. The formula for a settled lord is spoken over a man the next line will show weeping on a foreign shore, and the gap between the fixed phrase and the real man is the whole grief of the poem.
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