Odyssey 8.75 · Book 8, lines 75–78
The quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles
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νεῖκος Ὀδυσσῆος καὶ Πηλεΐδεω Ἀχιλῆος, ὥς ποτε δηρίσαντο θεῶν ἐν δαιτὶ θαλείῃ ἐκπάγλοις ἐπέεσσιν, ἄναξ δʼ ἀνδρῶν Ἀγαμέμνων χαῖρε νόῳ, ὅ τʼ ἄριστοι Ἀχαιῶν δηριόωντο.
the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles, son of Peleus — how once they had contended with violent words at a rich feast of the gods, and Agamemnon, lord of men, rejoiced in his heart that the best of the Achaeans were striving.
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The setting
Demodocus begins his song. Its subject is a famous quarrel at Troy between Odysseus and Achilles — a dispute the Greeks remembered, and one Agamemnon once heard with strange gladness.
A note on this passage
The bard's theme is named: a bitter quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles, how the two best of the Achaeans once contended with violent words at a feast of the gods, while Agamemnon secretly rejoiced to hear them.
Homer does not tell us the quarrel's cause, and no other source preserves it — the song is a door into a story we half-glimpse. What matters is who is listening. The stranger at the Phaeacian table, still unnamed, is one of the two men in the song; he is about to hear his own past sung by a man who cannot see him weep. Agamemnon once took joy in this strife; the reader knows a different man is about to take grief from it.
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