Odyssey 4.665 · Book 4, lines 665–666
Gone, with ship and crew
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Antinous — ἐκ τοσσῶνδʼ ἀέκητι νέος πάϊς οἴχεται αὔτως νῆα ἐρυσσάμενος, κρίνας τʼ ἀνὰ δῆμον ἀρίστους.
In despite of so many, the young boy is gone, just like that, having launched a ship and chosen the best men throughout the district.
Word by word
The setting
Antinous keeps speaking, spelling out just how the young man managed it: a ship launched and a picked crew, all against the suitors' will.
A note on this passage
The complaint is one of scale and ease. Against ‘so many’ watchful suitors, one young man simply left — launched a ship, took a crew of the district's best, and sailed. αὔτως, ‘just like that,’ carries the sting: it looks effortless.
The undercurrent is that Antinous keeps calling him a παῖς, a ‘boy.’ Yet the thing he describes is an adult's act — commandeering a ship and choosing men. The contempt in the word is already out of date. What the suitors will not see is that the boy they eat out of house has, in one night, begun to become the man they should fear.
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