Odyssey 4.802 · Book 4, lines 802–803
The dream slips in and stands over her
Read the full text in our reader
ἐς θάλαμον δʼ εἰσῆλθε παρὰ κληῖδος ἱμάντα, στῆ δʼ ἄρʼ ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς, καί μιν πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν·
And into the chamber it slipped in, past the bolt's strap, and stood over her head, and spoke a word to her:
Word by word
The setting
The phantom reaches the sleeping Penelope. It enters the locked bedchamber and takes the standard position of a dream at the sleeper's head before it speaks.
A note on this passage
The apparition arrives. It passes into the chamber alongside the leather thong that works the door-bolt — through the fastened door, not around it — and takes its stand over Penelope's head, the fixed posture of a dream in Homer, before it speaks. Every detail is the ordinary machinery of a dream-visitation.
The closed door is the point. Penelope's room is bolted, her world shut and guarded, and none of it keeps the divine out; the phantom slips past the very strap that locks the door. And 'standing over the head' is the same formula by which a deceiving Dream comes to Agamemnon in the Iliad — the pose that brings comfort here is drawn from the same technology that elsewhere brings a lie.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 4.802 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 4.802 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/4.802/