Odyssey 6.239 · Book 6, lines 239–240
“Hear me — not without the gods’ will”
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Nausicaa — κλῦτέ μευ, ἀμφίπολοι λευκώλενοι, ὄφρα τι εἴπω. οὐ πάντων ἀέκητι θεῶν, οἳ Ὄλυμπον ἔχουσιν,
Hear me, white-armed handmaids, so that I may say something. Not against the will of all the gods, who hold Olympus —
Word by word
The setting
Nausicaa opens her address to her maids. She begins piously, crediting the gods for the stranger's arrival, before she goes on (past these lines) to voice her own wish about the man. Her sentence is caught here mid-thought.
A note on this passage
Nausicaa gathers her maids to say what is on her mind. She opens conventionally, calling for their attention, and then frames what follows in the language of piety: nothing happens without the gods who hold Olympus. The lines break off here, in the middle of her thought.
The telling thing is where her mind goes first. Having watched the transformed stranger, her opening instinct is theology — the gods must have a hand in his coming. What she is working toward, in the lines just past this edge, is a wish about the man himself; but she reaches for heaven before she reaches for that. The pious frame both licenses and half-hides the feeling underneath it, and the poem lets us hear the beginning of the book's central 'almost.'
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Odyssey 6.239 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/6.239/