Odyssey 4.811 · Book 4, lines 811–813
You bid me cease from grief
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πωλέʼ, ἐπεὶ μάλα πολλὸν ἀπόπροθι δώματα ναίεις· καί με κέλεαι παύσασθαι ὀιζύος ἠδʼ ὀδυνάων πολλέων, αἵ μʼ ἐρέθουσι κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν,
did you come, since you dwell your halls so far away; and you bid me to cease from woe and the many pains that vex me throughout my mind and my heart,
Word by word
The setting
In a dream Athena's phantom, made in the likeness of Penelope's sister Iphthime, has told the sleeping queen not to weep, for her son will come home. Penelope, still in the dream, answers — wondering why a sister who lives far off should come now, and pressing back against the comfort.
A note on this passage
Penelope answers the phantom from inside her sleep. She marks the strangeness first — this sister lives far away and never visited before — and then refuses the easy comfort: you tell me to stop grieving, but the sorrows do not stop. The genitives pile the losses up, woe and pains together, and the relative clause makes them active agents, things that 'vex' her.
The undercurrent is how the poem sites grief. The pains work κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν — through the mind and through the heart, the two Homeric seats of thought and feeling at once. This is not a mood that can be talked away; it has taken the whole inner person. Even a god-sent dream meets a grief that answers back.
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