Odyssey 1.182 · Book 1, lines 182–185
Sailing for bronze
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νῦν δʼ ὧδε ξὺν νηὶ κατήλυθον ἠδʼ ἑτάροισιν πλέων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον ἐπʼ ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους, ἐς Τεμέσην μετὰ χαλκόν, ἄγω δʼ αἴθωνα σίδηρον. νηῦς δέ μοι ἥδʼ ἕστηκεν ἐπʼ ἀγροῦ νόσφι πόληος,
And now I have put in here with my ship and crew, sailing over the wine-dark sea to men of alien speech, to Temesa for bronze, and I carry gleaming iron. My ship stands there by the field, away from the city.
Word by word
The setting
Athena-as-Mentes fills in the traveler's details: a trading voyage across the sea to foreign shores, bound for Temesa to exchange iron for bronze, with the ship moored out in the country, away from the town.
A note on this passage
The lie is finished with a merchant's precise itinerary. Mentes is sailing to foreign-tongued peoples, to Temesa, to trade a cargo of iron for bronze; his ship is moored out by the farmland, not in the town harbor. Every detail is the sort a real trader gives, and the mundane specificity is what makes it convincing.
Two formulae carry more than the plot needs. The sea is οἶνοπα, ‘wine-dark,’ the poem's great fixed epithet, laid casually into a cover story. And the ship stands νόσφι πόληος, ‘away from the city’ — a small, deliberate touch: the goddess keeps her vessel out of sight, arriving among the suitors alone and on foot, exactly as a watchful visitor would.
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