Odyssey 4.663 · Book 4, lines 663–664
“A great deed, insolently done”
Read the full text in our reader
Antinous — ὢ πόποι, ἦ μέγα ἔργον ὑπερφιάλως ἐτελέσθη Τηλεμάχῳ ὁδὸς ἥδε· φάμεν δέ οἱ οὐ τελέεσθαι.
Ah me! Truly a great deed has been insolently accomplished by Telemachus — this journey; and we said it would never be accomplished for him.
Word by word
The setting
Antinous begins to speak to the assembled suitors, stunned that Telemachus has actually sailed. They had assumed the young man would never dare.
A note on this passage
Antinous names the shock plainly. Telemachus has brought off a ‘great deed’ — the voyage itself — and the word ὑπερφιάλως, ‘presumptuously,’ turns it into an outrage, a boy stepping past his place. And they had said, flatly, that he never would.
The undercurrent is the suitors' own blindness. ὑπερφιάλως is the very word the poem keeps fastening to the suitors themselves — their overreaching arrogance at the feast. Here Antinous flings it at Telemachus for the crime of acting like a man in his own house. The accuser wears the epithet he throws.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 4.663 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 4.663 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/4.663/