Odyssey 1.180 · Book 1, lines 180–181

Athena builds a plausible man. The verb εὔχομαι is exactly right — it means to declare one's lineage with pride, the formal way a Greek states who he is — and she uses it to plant a fiction. Mentes is given a father with a fitting epithet, ‘wise Anchialus,’ and a real people to rule.

The Taphians were known as seafarers and traders — φιλήρετμοι, ‘oar-loving’ — of the waters west of Ithaca. That is why the disguise holds: not a god's radiance but a checkable, ordinary identity, a neighboring trader of the kind who really does put in at Ithaca. Athena lies best by being unremarkable.

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