Odyssey 4.817 · Book 4, lines 817–819
Now my child too is gone
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νῦν αὖ παῖς ἀγαπητὸς ἔβη κοίλης ἐπὶ νηός, νήπιος, οὔτε πόνων ἐὺ εἰδὼς οὔτʼ ἀγοράων. τοῦ δὴ ἐγὼ καὶ μᾶλλον ὀδύρομαι ἤ περ ἐκείνου·
Now again my beloved son has gone aboard a hollow ship, a mere child, knowing neither toils nor assemblies. For him indeed I grieve even more than for that other man.
Word by word
The setting
Penelope moves from her first grief to her second and sharper one: Telemachus has secretly sailed for Pylos and Sparta to seek news of his father. To his mother he is still a boy with no experience of war-toils or the councils of men.
A note on this passage
The second loss lands harder than the first. The son has 'gone aboard a hollow ship' — the same phrasing the poem uses for real voyages into danger — and Penelope sees him as νήπιος, a child untried in the two arenas of a grown man's life, toils and assemblies. Then the blunt comparison: I grieve for him even more than for his father.
The undercurrent is dramatic irony the audience feels and Penelope cannot. To her, Telemachus sailing is only a second bereavement. But the poem has spent three books making this voyage his coming-of-age — the very thing that ends his being νήπιος. She grieves the boy leaving; the epic is showing the man arriving. Her fear and the plot's hope are the same event, read from two sides.
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