Odyssey 10.538 · Book 10, lines 538–540
There the seer will come
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ἔνθα τοι αὐτίκα μάντις ἐλεύσεται, ὄρχαμε λαῶν, ὅς κέν τοι εἴπῃσιν ὁδὸν καὶ μέτρα κελεύθου νόστον θʼ, ὡς ἐπὶ πόντον ἐλεύσεαι ἰχθυόεντα.
There at once the seer will come to you, leader of men, who will tell you the way and the measures of your path, and your homecoming, how you will travel over the fish-filled sea.
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The setting
Circe closes her instructions with the promise that Teiresias will appear and give Odysseus the route home over the sea.
A note on this passage
The instructions close on their reward: there the seer will come at once — Teiresias, who will tell Odysseus the way, the stages of his path, and his homecoming over the teeming sea.
The word that lands last is νόστος, homecoming — the thing the whole poem turns on. Odysseus goes down among the dead not for knowledge of the beyond but for directions home. Even the House of Hades is, for him, only a stage on the road to Ithaca; he questions the dead the way a traveler asks the way, and the answer he wants is a route across the fish-filled sea.
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