Odyssey 8.552 · Book 8, lines 552–554
No one is nameless
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οὐ μὲν γάρ τις πάμπαν ἀνώνυμός ἐστʼ ἀνθρώπων, οὐ κακὸς οὐδὲ μὲν ἐσθλός, ἐπὴν τὰ πρῶτα γένηται, ἀλλʼ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τίθενται, ἐπεί κε τέκωσι, τοκῆες.
For no one at all among men is nameless, neither base nor noble, once he is first born; but upon all the parents set a name, once they have borne them.
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The setting
Alcinous justifies the demand for a name with a small piece of human law: everyone has one. Good or bad, high or low, a child is given a name by its parents the moment it is born.
A note on this passage
A quiet universal: to be human is to be named. Alcinous makes namelessness impossible — no one, base or noble, goes without a name once his parents have borne him. The request for a name becomes a request to rejoin the roll of the living.
The undercurrent is the poem's long game with names. Odysseus has spent the whole epic unnamed — the stranger, the man — and once told a monster his name was Nobody. Against that stands Alcinous's flat assertion that a name is the birthright of every person. To answer him is to stop being nobody, and the pressure to answer has just been made a law of nature.
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