Odyssey 10.116 · Book 10, lines 116–120
They pelt the ships
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αὐτίχʼ ἕνα μάρψας ἑτάρων ὡπλίσσατο δεῖπνον· τὼ δὲ δύʼ ἀίξαντε φυγῇ ἐπὶ νῆας ἱκέσθην αὐτὰρ ὁ τεῦχε βοὴν διὰ ἄστεος· οἱ δʼ ἀίοντες φοίτων ἴφθιμοι Λαιστρυγόνες ἄλλοθεν ἄλλος, μυρίοι, οὐκ ἄνδρεσσιν ἐοικότες, ἀλλὰ Γίγασιν.
At once, seizing one of my companions, he made his meal; but the other two, darting off in flight, reached the ships. But he raised a shout through the town, and hearing it the mighty Laestrygonians came thronging from every side, one after another, thousands of them, not like men but like Giants.
Word by word
The setting
Antiphates seizes one scout on the spot and readies him as his meal. The other two race back to the ships. The king raises the alarm, and the Laestrygonians pour out from every side — countless, not like men but like Giants — to rain rocks on the trapped fleet.
A note on this passage
The violence is sudden and matter-of-fact. Antiphates does not threaten or bargain; he grabs a man and prepares him as food, and the two survivors run for their lives. Then his single war-cry turns a household horror into a civic hunt: the whole town pours out.
The closing simile does the real damage. These are not men, the poem says, but Giants — the Γίγαντες who once warred on the gods. In one line the encounter leaves the human scale entirely: Odysseus has led his men not into a hostile tribe but into a race out of the old myths of divine war, and against that there is no fighting, only the eleven ships already doomed in the still water below.
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