Odyssey 10.501 · Book 10, lines 501–502
Who will guide me on such a road?
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Odysseus — ὢ Κίρκη, τίς γὰρ ταύτην ὁδὸν ἡγεμονεύσει; εἰς Ἄϊδος δʼ οὔ πώ τις ἀφίκετο νηὶ μελαίνῃ.
O Circe, who then will guide us on this journey? To Hades no one has ever yet come in a black ship.
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The setting
Odysseus's practical objection. He has gathered himself, and the first thing he asks is the sailor's question: no living man has ever steered a ship to the land of the dead, so how is it even to be done?
A note on this passage
The mind is working again. Instead of despair Odysseus now raises the concrete difficulty: he has no pilot for a route no one has ever sailed. The dead lie beyond the known map, and a ship needs someone who knows the way.
The objection is also a quiet reminder of what he is being asked to do. "No one ever yet came to Hades in a black ship" is nearly a definition of death itself, the one voyage from which sailors do not return. He is not refusing; he is asking how a living man can make the crossing that by its nature is made only once, and one way.
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