The Odyssey Suffering Quotes Page 1
Citations follow this format: (Book.Line). We used Richmond Lattimore's translation. Very conveniently, Lattimore’s English edition follows the Greek exactly line-for-line.
| Quote #1 (Menelaos:) ‘[….] no one of the Achaians labored as much as Odysseus labored and achieved, and for him the end was grief for him, and for me a sorrow that is never forgotten for his sake, how he is gone so long, and we knew nothing of whether he is alive or dead.’ (4.106-110) |
There are many kinds of suffering in the Odyssey; compare Odysseus’s trials on the sea to Menelaos’s distress over his long-absent friend.
| Quote #2 (Penelope:) ‘Hear me, dear friends. The Olympian has given me sorrows beyond all others who were born and brought up together with me for first I lost a husband with the heart of a lion and who among the Danaans surpassed in all virtues, and great, whose fame goes wide through Hellas and midmost Argos; and now again the stormwinds have caught away my beloved son, without trace, from the halls, and I never heard when he left me. Hard-hearted, not one out of all of you then remembered to wake me out of my bed, though your minds knew all clearly, when he went out and away to board the hollow black ship. For if I had heard that he was considering this journey, then he would have had to stay, though hastening to his voyage, or he would have had to leave me dead in the halls.’ (4.722-735) |
Penelope, like Menelaos, acknowledges suffering. However, unlike the Spartan King, she is more concerned over Odysseus’s anguish than her own.
| Quote #3 By nights he would lie beside her, of necessity, in the hollow caerns, against his will, by one who was willing, but all the days he would sit upon the rocks, at the seaside, breaking his heart in tears and lamentation and sorrow as weeping tears he looked out over the barren water. (5.154-158) |
Odysseus has everything he could possibly want with Kalypso: eternal youth, luxury, prosperity, and sex – but still, he yearns for the trials of mortal life.
