Odyssey 9.12 · Book 9, lines 12–15
But you have asked about my sorrows
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σοὶ δʼ ἐμὰ κήδεα θυμὸς ἐπετράπετο στονόεντα εἴρεσθʼ, ὄφρʼ ἔτι μᾶλλον ὀδυρόμενος στεναχίζω· τί πρῶτόν τοι ἔπειτα, τί δʼ ὑστάτιον καταλέξω; κήδεʼ ἐπεί μοι πολλὰ δόσαν θεοὶ Οὐρανίωνες.
But your heart has inclined to ask about my grievous sorrows, so that I lament and groan still the more. What first, then, shall I recount to you, and what last? Since the heavenly gods gave me sorrows in plenty.
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus turns from praising the feast to the hard thing his host has asked for: the story of his sufferings. He pauses, as any storyteller might, before an ocean of grief.
A note on this passage
The mood turns. His host has asked to hear his sorrows, and to tell them is to live them again — so that he will weep the more in the telling. He hesitates at the sheer size of it: what to say first, what last.
The hesitation is not only grief but craft. A skilled narrator marks the weight of his material before he begins, and Odysseus does it while laying the blame on heaven: the gods gave him these troubles in plenty. The poem opened with Zeus insisting that men bring ruin on themselves; the hero, understandably, feels the hand from above.
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