previous next
[1] But Odysseus of many wiles stripped off his rags and sprang to the great threshold with the bow and the quiver full of arrows, and poured forth the swift arrows right there before his feet, and spoke among the wooers: [5] “Lo, now at last is this decisive contest ended; and now as for another mark, which till now no man has ever smitten, I will know1 if haply I may strike it, and Apollo grant me glory.” He spoke, and aimed a bitter arrow at Antinous. Now he was on the point of raising to his lips a fair goblet, [10] a two-eared cup of gold, and was even now handling it, that he might drink of the wine, and death was not in his thoughts. For who among men that sat at meat could think that one man among many, how strong soever he were, would bring upon himself evil death and black fate? [15] But Odysseus took aim, and smote him with an arrow in the throat, and clean out through the tender neck passed the point; he sank to one side, and the cup fell from his hand as he was smitten, and straightway up through his nostrils there came a thick jet of the blood of man; and quickly [20] he thrust the table from him with a kick of his foot, and spilled all the food on the floor, and the bread and roast flesh were befouled. Then into uproar broke the wooers through the halls, as they saw the man fallen, and from their high seats they sprang, driven in fear through the hall, gazing everywhere along the well-built walls; [25] but nowhere was there a shield or mighty spear to seize. But they railed at Odysseus with angry words: “Stranger, to thy cost dost thou shoot at men; never again shalt thou take part in other contests; now is thy utter destruction sure. Aye, for thou hast now slain a man who was far the best [30] of the youths in Ithaca; therefore shall vultures devour thee here.” So spoke2 each man, for verily they thought that he had not slain the man willfully; and in their folly they knew not this, that over themselves one and all the cords of destruction had been made fast. Then with an angry glance from beneath his brows Odysseus of many wiles answered them: [35] “Ye dogs, ye thought that I should never more come home from the land of the Trojans, seeing that ye wasted my house, and lay with the maidservants by force, and while yet I lived covertly wooed my wife, having no fear of the gods, who hold broad heaven, [40] nor of the indignation of men, that is to be hereafter. Now over you one and all have the cords of destruction been made fast.”

1 1

2 1

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Greek (1919)
load focus English (Samuel Butler, Based on public domain edition, revised by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy., 1900)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Ithaca (Greece) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (4 total)
  • Cross-references to this page (1):
    • Raphael Kühner, Bernhard Gerth, Ausführliche Grammatik der griechischen Sprache, KG 1.3.1
  • Cross-references in notes to this page (1):
  • Cross-references in general dictionaries to this page (1):
  • Cross-references in text-specific dictionaries to this page (1):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: