previous next

[391] ἦ φῄς, ‘thinkest thou (cp. Od.4. 171; 5.290; 6. 200) that it is the worst thing in the world to be a king? Nay! it is no bad thing to be a king; not only is his house made rich at once, but he himself is in more honour.’ Nitzsch prefers “ἢ φῄς”=‘or.’ The point in this taunt of Telemachus is that he pretends to see in Antinous' words a kindly anxiety for him, in being anxious to spare him the troubles of sovereignty, though he himself was so eager to be king in Ithaca.

Homer's Odyssey. W. Walter Merry. James Riddell. D. B. Monro. Oxford. Clarendon Press. 1886-1901.

The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.

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.

hide References (2 total)
  • Commentary references from this page (2):
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: