Odyssey 10.410 · Book 10, lines 410–413
Like calves to the herd
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ὡς δʼ ὅτʼ ἂν ἄγραυλοι πόριες περὶ βοῦς ἀγελαίας, ἐλθούσας ἐς κόπρον, ἐπὴν βοτάνης κορέσωνται, πᾶσαι ἅμα σκαίρουσιν ἐναντίαι· οὐδʼ ἔτι σηκοὶ ἴσχουσʼ, ἀλλʼ ἁδινὸν μυκώμεναι ἀμφιθέουσι·
And as when farmstead calves around the cows of the herd, having come to the yard, when they have had their fill of grazing, all together at once skip to meet them; and the pens no longer hold them, but lowing incessantly they run all around —
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The setting
Odysseus interrupts his own narrative with a simile to convey how the crew mobbed him with joy. The image is drawn from the farmstead the men have not seen in years.
A note on this passage
Odysseus reaches for a farm image: penned calves that see the returning herd, break out, and gambol round their mothers, bawling. The picture is exact and homely — no fences hold them, the crying is nonstop, the running is all one direction.
The simile quietly reverses the book's own horror. A few hundred lines back these same men were made into swine, herded and penned; now the animal they are likened to is a calf running to its mother, and the pen is the thing they burst out of. Homer uses the pastoral world to measure both captivity and homecoming — and the tenderness of the comparison is the point, since the ‘mothers’ the men run to is Odysseus himself.
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