Odyssey 4.735 · Book 4, lines 735–738
Send for old Dolius, to tell Laertes
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ἀλλά τις ὀτρηρῶς Δολίον καλέσειε γέροντα, δμῶʼ ἐμόν, ὅν μοι δῶκε πατὴρ ἔτι δεῦρο κιούσῃ, καί μοι κῆπον ἔχει πολυδένδρεον, ὄφρα τάχιστα Λαέρτῃ τάδε πάντα παρεζόμενος καταλέξῃ,
But let someone quickly call old Dolius, my own servant, whom my father gave me when I still came here, and who keeps my orchard of many trees, so that with all speed, sitting beside Laertes, he may recount all this.
Word by word
The setting
Penelope forms a plan through her tears: summon Dolius, the old gardener her father gave her as a dowry-servant, and send him to Laertes — Odysseus's aged father, living apart on his farm — with the news.
A note on this passage
Even in grief Penelope acts. She calls for Dolius, an old and trusted servant she has kept since her marriage, and sends him running to Laertes on his outland farm. The domestic detail — the dowry-servant, the orchard of many trees he tends — grounds the panic in the ordinary machinery of a great house that still, somehow, functions.
The undercurrent is who she turns to. Not the suitors, not even the maids she has just cursed, but the oldest generation: Laertes, the grandfather withdrawn from the world in his grief for Odysseus. Penelope reaches past the corrupted middle of the household to its patient roots, as if only the very old can be trusted now — a family closing ranks around its eldest against the danger in its own halls.
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