Odyssey 10.414 · Book 10, lines 414–417
As if they had come home
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μητέρας· ὣς ἔμʼ ἐκεῖνοι ἐπεὶ ἴδον ὀφθαλμοῖσι, δακρυόεντες ἔχυντο· δόκησε δʼ ἄρα σφίσι θυμὸς ὣς ἔμεν, ὡς εἰ πατρίδʼ ἱκοίατο καὶ πόλιν αὐτὴν τρηχείης Ἰθάκης, ἵνα τʼ ἔτραφεν ἠδʼ ἐγένοντο.
their mothers; so those men, when they saw me with their eyes, thronged round me weeping; and their heart thought it was so, as if they had reached their homeland and the very city of rugged Ithaca, where they were bred and born.
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The setting
The simile of the calves closes and its meaning lands: this is how the crew swarmed Odysseus when they saw him safe. To their overwhelmed hearts it felt like reaching Ithaca itself.
A note on this passage
The comparison resolves. Just as the calves mob their mothers, the men crowd weeping around Odysseus the instant they see him. The vehicle and its meaning are stitched together across the line — ‘their mothers; so those men.’
Then Homer names the feeling exactly: it seemed to them as though they had reached Ithaca itself, the rugged island where they were born and raised. The homecoming is imagined, not real — Odysseus is not their country, only their captain, and Ithaca is still a whole poem away. But the poem lets the men have the illusion for a moment, and the ache in it is that a safe captain is the nearest thing to home they have had in years.
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