Odyssey 4.703 · Book 4, lines 703–706
Her knees give way
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ὣς φάτο, τῆς δʼ αὐτοῦ λύτο γούνατα καὶ φίλον ἦτορ, δὴν δέ μιν ἀμφασίη ἐπέων λάβε· τὼ δέ οἱ ὄσσε δακρυόφι πλῆσθεν, θαλερὴ δέ οἱ ἔσχετο φωνή. ὀψὲ δὲ δή μιν ἔπεσσιν ἀμειβομένη προσέειπε·
So he spoke, and there her knees and dear heart gave way, and for a long while speechlessness at his words seized her; her two eyes filled with tears, and her rich voice was stopped. At last, answering him, she addressed him:
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The setting
Medon has just told Penelope both that her son secretly sailed and that the suitors mean to kill him on his way home. This is her reaction.
A note on this passage
The news strikes her body before she can speak. Her knees loosen, her heart with them, and a long speechlessness seizes her; her eyes fill, her voice is checked. Only after a silence — ‘at last’ — does she find words to answer the herald.
Homer renders grief as physical collapse, and the phrase for it, ‘her knees were loosened,’ is the very one the poem uses when a warrior is cut down in battle. A mother hearing that her son may be murdered is felled as surely as a spear-struck man. The epic keeps one vocabulary for the body giving way, whether to bronze or to sorrow, and lays it on Penelope here.
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