Odyssey 4.428 · Book 4, lines 428–430
Supper, and ambrosial night
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αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥʼ ἐπὶ νῆα κατήλυθον ἠδὲ θάλασσαν, δόρπον θʼ ὁπλισάμεσθʼ, ἐπί τʼ ἤλυθεν ἀμβροσίη νύξ· δὴ τότε κοιμήθημεν ἐπὶ ῥηγμῖνι θαλάσσης.
But when I had come down to the ship and the sea, we made ready our supper, and immortal night came on; then we lay down to sleep on the surf of the sea.
Word by word
The setting
Menelaus and his men, marooned on the island of Pharos off Egypt, make camp for the night before the dawn ambush of Proteus.
A note on this passage
A short type-scene: return, supper, nightfall, sleep. The verse runs on rails the audience knows by heart, the small liturgy of a day's end that Homer plays a hundred times over the poem.
The undercurrent hides in a stock epithet. Night is 'ambrosial,' the same divine word that will name the ambrosia Eidothea slips under their noses at dawn to blunt the seal-stench. The formula sits quietly here, ordinary; a few lines on, the immortal thing it names turns out to be exactly what saves them. The poem lays the word down before it needs it.
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