Odyssey 7.211 · Book 7, lines 211–214
He could match the most wretched of men
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οὕς τινας ὑμεῖς ἴστε μάλιστʼ ὀχέοντας ὀιζὺν ἀνθρώπων, τοῖσίν κεν ἐν ἄλγεσιν ἰσωσαίμην. καὶ δʼ ἔτι κεν καὶ μᾶλλον ἐγὼ κακὰ μυθησαίμην, ὅσσα γε δὴ ξύμπαντα θεῶν ἰότητι μόγησα.
Whatever men you know as bearing misery most of all of men, with those men I could match myself in their griefs. And I could tell yet more evils too, all that altogether by the gods' will I have suffered.
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The setting
Odysseus is speaking at Alcinous's feast, having asked for convoy home. Here he presses the point that his sufferings outdo any man's, and that he could recount still more woes sent by the gods.
A note on this passage
Odysseus keeps the ground he has taken. He claims a strange kind of primacy: match him against whatever men you hold most wretched, and in sheer grief he will equal them, and could tell of more. It is the boast of a survivor, and it is also a plea — a man asking to be sent home stakes his case on how much he has borne.
Under the claim runs the poem's own accounting. ἰότητι, ‘by the gods' will,’ quietly hands the suffering back to heaven: the woes are not bad luck but something willed from above. Odysseus does not curse the gods for it; he states it as a fact he has learned to carry, the way one states the weather.
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