Odyssey 7.219 · Book 7, lines 219–221
The belly bids him eat and forget
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ὡς καὶ ἐγὼ πένθος μὲν ἔχω φρεσίν, ἡ δὲ μάλʼ αἰεὶ ἐσθέμεναι κέλεται καὶ πινέμεν, ἐκ δέ με πάντων ληθάνει ὅσσʼ ἔπαθον, καὶ ἐνιπλησθῆναι ἀνώγει.
As I too hold grief in my heart, yet it forever bids me eat and drink, and makes me forget utterly all that I have suffered, and commands me to be filled full.
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The setting
Odysseus completes the thought: he, like any man, carries grief, yet the belly overrides it — commanding food and drink and, for a while, forgetfulness of all he has endured.
A note on this passage
The apology finishes with an honest paradox. Odysseus holds real grief, and the same belly that shamed him a moment ago now does him a mercy: it makes him eat, drink, and briefly forget his sufferings. Hunger, which looked like weakness, turns out to be the body's way of surviving sorrow.
The quiet word is ‘forget.’ The Odyssey is full of dangerous forgetting — the lotus, Circe, Calypso's island, all the sweet oblivions that nearly cost him home. Here forgetting is small and safe: one meal's respite. But the poem has taught us to hear the word warily, and the man who most wants to remember Ithaca admits how good it is, sometimes, to set memory down.
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