Odyssey 9.294 · Book 9, lines 294–295
We lifted our hands to Zeus
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ἡμεῖς δὲ κλαίοντες ἀνεσχέθομεν Διὶ χεῖρας, σχέτλια ἔργʼ ὁρόωντες, ἀμηχανίη δʼ ἔχε θυμόν.
But we, weeping, lifted up our hands to Zeus, as we watched his cruel deeds; and helplessness gripped our heart.
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The setting
The survivors can do nothing but pray. Watching the atrocity, they raise their hands to Zeus — and helplessness takes hold of them.
A note on this passage
Two lines of pure response. The men do the only thing left to them — weep and pray — and the poem names the feeling exactly: helplessness, the state of having no move to make. They lift their hands to a Zeus whose law the Cyclops has just told them he ignores.
The undercurrent is in the word for helplessness. It is the flat negation of the very quality that names Odysseus — the man of many devices, never without a way out. For one night even he has none; the resourceful hero is reduced, with his crew, to raised hands and no plan. The escape will have to be invented from inside that nothing.
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