Odyssey 8.523 · Book 8, lines 523–525
A simile: the widow over her fallen man
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ὡς δὲ γυνὴ κλαίῃσι φίλον πόσιν ἀμφιπεσοῦσα, ὅς τε ἑῆς πρόσθεν πόλιος λαῶν τε πέσῃσιν, ἄστεϊ καὶ τεκέεσσιν ἀμύνων νηλεὲς ἦμαρ·
And as a woman weeps, flinging herself upon her dear husband, who has fallen before his own city and his people, warding the pitiless day from his town and children —
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The setting
To measure Odysseus's weeping, Homer opens one of his great similes. It pictures a woman in a captured city, throwing herself on the body of her husband, who died in the doorway defending the town.
A note on this passage
Homer answers Odysseus's tears with an image, not an explanation. A woman clings to her dying husband — a man killed at the wall, fighting to hold off ‘the pitiless day’ from his city and his children. The scene is one frozen gesture: the fall, the embrace.
The cruelty is in whose grief this is. Odysseus is compared not to a fallen warrior but to that warrior's widow — the victim of exactly the kind of sack he has just been praised for. The conqueror of Troy weeps with the grief of the conquered. Homer makes the hero feel, from the inside, the ruin his own hands have caused.
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