Odyssey 10.103 · Book 10, lines 103–106
The girl at the road
Read the full text in our reader
οἱ δʼ ἴσαν ἐκβάντες λείην ὁδόν, ᾗ περ ἄμαξαι ἄστυδʼ ἀφʼ ὑψηλῶν ὀρέων καταγίνεον ὕλην, κούρῃ δὲ ξύμβληντο πρὸ ἄστεος ὑδρευούσῃ θυγατέρʼ ἰφθίμῃ Λαιστρυγόνος Ἀντιφάταο.
They went, disembarking, along a smooth road where the wagons brought down timber from the high mountains; and before the town they met a girl drawing water, the strong daughter of Antiphates the Laestrygonian.
Word by word
The setting
The three scouts land and follow a smooth cart-road — the track by which wagons haul timber down from the hills to the town. Before the walls they meet a girl fetching water: the powerful daughter of Antiphates, the Laestrygonian king.
A note on this passage
The approach is filled with the marks of a real, working town: a graded cart-road, timber hauled down from the hills, a girl sent out for water at the spring. Everything looks like ordinary human life, and the meeting at the well is a classic Homeric type-scene — the stranger and the water-drawing maiden.
The same meeting opened well for Odysseus once before, with gentle Nausicaa on Phaeacia; the poem is running the pattern again with the dial turned to horror. This girl is ‘strong’ — ἰφθίμη, a word for warriors — and daughter to a king who eats his guests. The familiar scene is a lure, and its very ordinariness is what makes the reversal land.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 10.103 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 10.103 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/10.103/