Odyssey 5.306 · Book 5, lines 306–307
Envy of the war dead
Read the full text in our reader
τρὶς μάκαρες Δαναοὶ καὶ τετράκις, οἳ τότʼ ὄλοντο Τροίῃ ἐν εὐρείῃ χάριν Ἀτρεΐδῃσι φέροντες.
Three times blessed and four times over were those Danaans who perished back then in wide Troy, bearing a favour for the sons of Atreus.
Word by word
The setting
Still speaking, Odysseus breaks off from the storm to a bitter comparison: the Greeks who died fighting at Troy were luckier than he is now.
A note on this passage
The lament turns to envy of the dead. Odysseus calls the Greeks who fell at Troy 'three and four times blessed' — the ones who died on land, in the great war, and were buried by their comrades. Set against a lonely drowning, a soldier's death looks like good fortune.
This speaks straight to the Iliad's world, where a hero's whole aim is a death that wins κλέος, fame kept alive in song. The Odyssey does not deny that ideal; it strands its hero somewhere the ideal cannot reach him. To die unseen at sea is to die without witnesses, and so without a story — the one end an epic hero cannot bear.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 5.306 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 5.306 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/5.306/