Odyssey 4.669 · Book 4, lines 669–670
“Give me a ship and twenty men”
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Antinous — ἀλλʼ ἄγε μοι δότε νῆα θοὴν καὶ εἴκοσʼ ἑταίρους, ὄφρα μιν αὐτὸν ἰόντα λοχήσομαι ἠδὲ φυλάξω
But come, give me a swift ship and twenty companions, so that I may ambush him himself as he comes, and lie in wait,
Word by word
The setting
Antinous proposes the ambush: he will take a fast ship and a picked crew and waylay Telemachus at sea on his voyage home.
A note on this passage
The plan is laid out like a small military order: a swift ship, twenty men, an ambush on the returning boy. The homecoming voyage — the νόστος the whole poem is built to protect — is exactly what Antinous means to cut short.
The undercurrent is the dark mirror of the main story. Odysseus struggles across the sea toward home; his son now faces an ambush on his own smaller sea-road, plotted by men inside his own house. The poem doubles the father's danger onto the son, and makes the killers not monsters or strangers but the guests at the family table.
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Odyssey 4.669 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/4.669/