Odyssey 4.561 · Book 4, lines 561–563
Not death in Argos
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σοὶ δʼ οὐ θέσφατόν ἐστι, διοτρεφὲς ὦ Μενέλαε, Ἄργει ἐν ἱπποβότῳ θανέειν καὶ πότμον ἐπισπεῖν, ἀλλά σʼ ἐς Ἠλύσιον πεδίον καὶ πείρατα γαίης
But for you, Zeus-nurtured Menelaus, it is not decreed to die in horse-pasturing Argos and meet your doom; rather, to the Elysian plain and the ends of the earth,
Word by word
The setting
Proteus turns from Odysseus to Menelaus's own end. He foretells that Menelaus will not die an ordinary death in his kingdom of Argos, but will be carried off alive to a place at the world's edge — the only such promise in Homer.
A note on this passage
The prophecy opens by denying the expected. A great king dies at home, in ‘horse-pasturing Argos,’ and meets his ‘doom’ (πότμος, the lot of death). Proteus says: not for you. The sentence withholds the alternative to the next line, so the ear waits.
This is the one place in Homer where a living man is promised he will escape death altogether. θέσφατον — ‘spoken by god’ — is the word for what fate has settled, and here what fate has settled is an exemption. The reader used to the iron rule that all mortals die meets, for a moment, its single exception, and the reason is still to come.
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Odyssey 4.561 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/4.561/