Odyssey 4.724 · Book 4, lines 724–726
The lion-hearted husband, first loss
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ἣ πρὶν μὲν πόσιν ἐσθλὸν ἀπώλεσα θυμολέοντα, παντοίῃς ἀρετῇσι κεκασμένον ἐν Δαναοῖσιν, ἐσθλόν, τοῦ κλέος εὐρὺ καθʼ Ἑλλάδα καὶ μέσον Ἄργος.
I who once lost my noble husband, the lion-hearted, excelling in every excellence among the Danaans — a noble man, whose wide fame ran through Hellas and mid-Argos.
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The setting
Penelope names the first and older of her sorrows: the loss of Odysseus, gone twenty years to Troy and the sea. She praises him in the fixed language of heroic worth before turning to the fresher wound.
A note on this passage
She sets her two griefs in sequence — first the husband, now the son — and dwells on the first in the vocabulary of epic praise: noble, lion-hearted, excelling among the Danaans, his fame spread over all Greece. This is the public Odysseus, the hero as the world knows him, and Penelope claims that whole reputation as the measure of what she has lost.
The undercurrent is that she speaks of him as already gone. "I lost" is flat, past, final — no hedging that he might yet live. For Penelope, in this moment, the husband is a closed grief, and it is precisely because the old wound has scarred over into certainty that the new one, the missing son, cuts so sharply.
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