Odyssey 8.584 · Book 8, lines 584–586
A comrade is no less than a brother
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ἦ τίς που καὶ ἑταῖρος ἀνὴρ κεχαρισμένα εἰδώς, ἐσθλός; ἐπεὶ οὐ μέν τι κασιγνήτοιο χερείων γίγνεται, ὅς κεν ἑταῖρος ἐὼν πεπνυμένα εἰδῇ.
Or was it perhaps some companion too, a man knowing kind things, a noble one? Since in no way at all is he worse than a brother, who, being a comrade, knows wise things.
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The setting
The last lines of Book 8, and the last of Alcinous's speech. His second guess: perhaps it was a beloved companion who fell. He closes with a maxim — a true comrade is worth no less than a brother — and the book breaks off on the edge of the hero's own answer.
A note on this passage
Alcinous offers his other guess — a dear companion killed at Troy — and rounds it off with a sentence of plain wisdom: a comrade who is loyal and sensible is in no way lesser than a brother. With that the book ends, poised on the question the guest has not yet answered.
The undercurrent is that Alcinous has, without knowing it, named the truth. Odysseus's grief is exactly for comrades — the men he led to Troy and could not bring home. And the maxim lands hard: the poem is about to spend book after book on a man who loses every last one of those comrades, so that the worth of a companion, weighed here against a brother, is the running cost of the whole return.
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