Odyssey 4.721 · Book 4, lines 721–723
Penelope's lament: grief heaped on grief
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τῇς δʼ ἁδινὸν γοόωσα μετηύδα Πηνελόπεια·
Penelope — κλῦτε, φίλαι· πέρι γάρ μοι Ὀλύμπιος ἄλγεʼ ἔδωκεν ἐκ πασέων, ὅσσαι μοι ὁμοῦ τράφεν ἠδʼ ἐγένοντο·
Among them, wailing shrilly, Penelope spoke: Hear me, friends; for above all others the Olympian has given me griefs, beyond all the women who were reared and born with me.
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The setting
In Ithaca, Penelope has just learned that her son Telemachus has secretly sailed for Pylos and that the suitors mean to ambush him at sea. Overcome, she sinks down among her handmaids and begins to grieve aloud.
A note on this passage
Penelope opens the way a Homeric sufferer does: by measuring her pain against everyone else's. The Olympian, she says, has singled her out for grief beyond all the women born and raised alongside her — pain as a kind of grim distinction. The address to the maids ("Hear me, friends") frames the whole speech as a public accounting of what has been taken from her.
The undercurrent is how grief reaches for comparison. She does not simply hurt; she ranks her hurt, sets herself apart as the most afflicted of her generation. It is the same instinct that makes Achilles and Odysseus catalogue their sufferings — the Homeric conviction that a life is weighed by what it has had to endure.
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