Odyssey 4.732 · Book 4, lines 732–734
Had I known, I would have stopped him
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εἰ γὰρ ἐγὼ πυθόμην ταύτην ὁδὸν ὁρμαίνοντα, τῷ κε μάλʼ ἤ κεν ἔμεινε καὶ ἐσσύμενός περ ὁδοῖο, ἤ κέ με τεθνηκυῖαν ἐνὶ μεγάροισιν ἔλειπεν.
For had I learned he was pondering this journey, then surely either he would have stayed, eager for the road though he was, or he would have left me dead in the halls.
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The setting
Penelope imagines the counterfactual: if the maids had woken her and she had confronted Telemachus, she would have kept him home — or died in the attempt to.
A note on this passage
She lays out what her waking would have changed. Confronted, Telemachus would either have abandoned the voyage, however set on it — or he would have had to leave over her dead body. The two outcomes are stark: his obedience, or her death. There is no version in which she simply lets him go.
The undercurrent is the reach and the limit of a mother's power. Penelope believes her mere presence, her plea, could have overruled a grown son straining toward manhood — and perhaps it could have. But the phrase "left me dead" admits the other truth: that stopping him might have cost everything, that love this fierce is prepared to make itself an obstacle the child must climb over to grow.
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