Odyssey 10.304 · Book 10, lines 304–306
The gods call it moly
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ῥίζῃ μὲν μέλαν ἔσκε, γάλακτι δὲ εἴκελον ἄνθος· μῶλυ δέ μιν καλέουσι θεοί· χαλεπὸν δέ τʼ ὀρύσσειν ἀνδράσι γε θνητοῖσι, θεοὶ δέ τε πάντα δύνανται.
At the root it was black, but its flower was like milk; and the gods call it moly. It is hard to dig for mortal men, but the gods can do all things.
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus describes the plant Hermes has just shown him: black at the root, milk-white in flower. Then comes the famous line naming it in the language of the gods.
A note on this passage
Three lines of botany that turn into theology. The plant is given a body — black root, milk-white bloom — and then a name, and the name is not a human one: μῶλυ δέ μιν καλέουσι θεοί, ‘moly the gods call it.’ The last line explains the gap: hard for mortals even to dig, the herb belongs to the side that can do anything.
The undercurrent is the language of the gods. Homer now and then reports that the immortals have their own word for a thing, different from ours, and each time it marks a border a human cannot fully cross. Here that border is also the plot: moly is the one φάρμακον Circe's φάρμακα cannot answer, and the reader is told, in the gods' own word, why Odysseus will walk out of her hall still a man.
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