Laudator Temporis Acti

Here is the end of book 2 (lines 430-434) of Homer's Odyssey in Daniel Mendelsohn's new translation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2025), followed by the Greek:

Once they had bound fast the tackle on the swift-running, black-hulled ship
They set out two-handled jars that were filled to the brim with wine
And poured libations out to the deathless gods everlasting—
Above all to the daughter of Zeus, she of the bright owl-eyes.
All through the night and into the dawn the ship cut her way.

δησάμενοι δ᾽ ἄρα ὅπλα θοὴν ἀνὰ νῆα μέλαιναν
στήσαντο κρητῆρας ἐπιστεφέας οἴνοιο,
λεῖβον δ᾽ ἀθανάτοισι θεοῖς αἰειγενέτῃσιν,
ἐκ πάντων δὲ μάλιστα Διὸς γλαυκώπιδι κούρῃ.
παννυχίη μέν ῥ᾽ ἥ γε καὶ ἠῶ πεῖρε κέλευθον.

As I construe the English in line 433, "she of the bright owl-eyes" is in apposition to "the daughter of Zeus" (i.e. Athena), and "the daughter of Zeus" is the object of the preposition "to". But "she of the bright owl-eyes" is a nominative phrase, and how, therefore, can it be the object of a preposition? That, to me, is the puzzle. Probably I'm just too obtuse to understand. After all, Mendelsohn's grasp of English and Greek is obviously superior to mine, and what looks to me like a grammatical error must have some explanation. I just can't see it.

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Hi, Mike,

For the heck of it I fed the passage you quoted into Claude to see what it would say. I can't vouch for whether it is right about epithets being frozen in the nominative, but it has a certain plausibility. I'm kind of impressed with how much it can do with so little. But, as you know, it also can just make stuff up.

Kevin [Muse]

My prompt:

In this translation from the Odyssey, "she" appears to be a grammatical error. Can you analyze?: Once they had bound fast the tackle on the swift-running, black-hulled ship They set out two-handled jars that were filled to the brim with wine And poured libations out to the deathless gods everlasting— Above all to the daughter of Zeus, she of the bright owl-eyes. All through the night and into the dawn the ship cut her way.

Claude's Answer:

Let me check which translation this is from, since identifying the translator will help pin down whether this is a deliberate stylistic choice.This is a great catch, and I think I can resolve it. First, confirmation of context: this is from Homer's Odyssey Book 2 (the departure scene when Telemachus's ship sets sail for Pylos) — I found a parallel rendering of the same lines elsewhere confirming this passage and its content.

Is "she" actually an error?

No — but it's worth walking through exactly why it looks like one, because your instinct about case-agreement is grammatically sound in principle.

The sentence structure is:

"...poured libations out to the deathless gods everlasting— / Above all to the daughter of Zeus, she of the bright owl-eyes."

"The daughter of Zeus" is the object of the preposition "to." In strict English grammar, an appositive should match the case of the noun it re-identifies. Since English nouns don't visibly decline for case but pronouns do, if you swapped in a pronoun for "the daughter of Zeus" directly, you'd get the objective form: "to her." So by that logic, the appositive tag ought to be "her of the bright owl-eyes," not "she of the bright owl-eyes" — which is exactly the mismatch you spotted.

Why translators do it anyway

This "[pronoun] of the [quality]" construction functions as a fixed epithet-formula in English poetic translation, not as an ordinary grammatical appositive subject to normal case rules. It's the same pattern as archaic/Biblical English like "O ye of little faith," or poetic tags like "he of the silver tongue" — these are conventionally frozen in the nominative regardless of their syntactic position in the sentence, because they're functioning more like a title or standing epithet ("Bright-Owl-Eyed One") than like a normal descriptive clause.

Why this happens specifically in Homer translation

The deeper reason is that Homer's Greek is an inflected language — the original epithet here (a form of glaukōpis, "gray/bright/owl-eyed," describing Athena) is properly declined to match the case of "daughter" in the Greek sentence (both would appear in the dative, since the phrase is the object of "to"). Greek has no case-mismatch problem at all, because the adjective bends with the noun.

English adjectives don't decline, so when a translator wants to render that same standing epithet as a phrase rather than a simple adjective ("bright-owl-eyed daughter of Zeus"), they sometimes convert it into a nominalized tag ("she of the bright owl-eyes") for rhythm or emphasis — and that conversion drags in a pronoun that does carry visible case marking in English, where the original adjective didn't. The "error" you're sensing is really a seam left behind by translating a case-inflected epithet into a language where only pronouns still show case.

So: not a slip, but a deliberate (if grammatically loose by strict prescriptive standards) stylistic device — an artifact of representing a Homeric formulaic epithet in English, following a convention with real precedent elsewhere in English poetic diction.

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This explanation doesn't convince me. "O ye of little faith" is vocative, easily parsed according to the rules of English grammar.