Odyssey 4.91 · Book 4, lines 91–93
A brother murdered at his homecoming
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ἠλώμην, τῆός μοι ἀδελφεὸν ἄλλος ἔπεφνεν λάθρῃ, ἀνωιστί, δόλῳ οὐλομένης ἀλόχοιο· ὣς οὔ τοι χαίρων τοῖσδε κτεάτεσσιν ἀνάσσω.
While I wandered, another man slew my brother by stealth, unawares, by the guile of his accursed wife; so with no joy I rule these possessions.
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The setting
Menelaus is hosting Telemachus and Nestor's son Peisistratus at Sparta and has been recalling the comrades he lost. Now he turns to the deepest wound: his brother Agamemnon, killed at his own homecoming.
A note on this passage
Menelaus names the crime behind his splendor. While he was still lost on his own long voyage home, his brother Agamemnon was killed at his hearth — not in open battle but by stealth, through the scheming of Clytemnestra. All the wealth of Sparta gives him no joy.
The murdered-king story is the shadow the whole poem casts: a husband away at war, a treacherous wife, a homecoming turned to slaughter. It is the nightmare version of every return, and Menelaus tells it not knowing that one of his young guests is the son of Odysseus, whose own house now stands in just that danger.
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