Odyssey 8.331 · Book 8, lines 331–333
The gods' moral: the slow catches the swift
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ὠκύτατόν περ ἐόντα θεῶν οἳ Ὄλυμπον ἔχουσιν, χωλὸς ἐὼν τέχνῃσι· τὸ καὶ μοιχάγριʼ ὀφέλλει. ὣς οἱ μὲν τοιαῦτα πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἀγόρευον·
Swiftest though he is of the gods who hold Olympus, and lame though he is, by his crafts — and for this reason the adulterer's fine mounts up. So they, for their part, were speaking such things to one another.
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The setting
Inside the bard Demodocus's song, Hephaestus has trapped his wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares in an unbreakable net and called the gods to witness. Here the watching gods finish their comment on the scene.
A note on this passage
The gods, watching Ares and Aphrodite snared in the net, draw a moral out loud: the slow overtakes the swift. Hephaestus, lame and left behind at the forge, has caught the fastest god of all by craft — and so the fine a caught adulterer owes only mounts higher. Then the narrator closes their murmuring: such were the things they said to one another.
Under the joke sits the poem's favorite proposition. Not speed, not strength, but skill wins here, τέχνη over raw force. It is the argument of the whole Odyssey in miniature, spoken by minor gods over a comic scandal: the cunning man, disadvantaged and underestimated, takes the stronger by a trap. Homer lets his audience hear the theme rehearsed as gossip on Olympus.
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