Odyssey 1.48 · Book 1, lines 48–50
But my heart is torn for Odysseus
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ἀλλά μοι ἀμφʼ Ὀδυσῆι δαΐφρονι δαίεται ἦτορ, δυσμόρῳ, ὃς δὴ δηθὰ φίλων ἄπο πήματα πάσχει νήσῳ ἐν ἀμφιρύτῃ, ὅθι τʼ ὀμφαλός ἐστι θαλάσσης.
But my heart is torn for skilled Odysseus, that ill-starred man, who, so long now, far from his own, suffers sorrows on a sea-girt island, where lies the navel of the sea.
Word by word
The setting
Athena, having disposed of Aegisthus, turns to the man she came for. Odysseus has been held for years on the island of the nymph Calypso, far out at sea — the situation the whole first movement of the poem exists to end.
A note on this passage
Now the real business. Athena turns from Aegisthus to Odysseus, and her whole feeling changes: her heart is torn for him — the skilled, ill-starred man who has suffered for years, cut off from everyone he loves, on a remote island far out in the water.
The image to hold is the last one: the island lies at ‘the navel of the sea,’ the ὀμφαλός, the still centre-point of the water. The poem sets Odysseus as far from human company as it can place a man — as remote, in his way, as Poseidon among the Aethiopians at the world's rim. Isolation given as geography: home is a whole sea away, and he is at its dead centre.
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