Odyssey 4.508 · Book 4, lines 508–510
The rock that carried him down
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καὶ τὸ μὲν αὐτόθι μεῖνε, τὸ δὲ τρύφος ἔμπεσε πόντῳ, τῷ ῥʼ Αἴας τὸ πρῶτον ἐφεζόμενος μέγʼ ἀάσθη· τὸν δʼ ἐφόρει κατὰ πόντον ἀπείρονα κυμαίνοντα.
And the one part stayed there, but the other, the broken piece, fell into the sea — on which Ajax had first been sitting, greatly blinded; and it bore him over the boundless deep, the surging sea.
Word by word
The setting
Poseidon has struck the Gyraean rock. Proteus finishes the death of Ajax son of Oïleus: one half of the split crag holds fast, the other — the very piece Ajax sat on — falls into the sea and drags him under.
A note on this passage
The stone breaks in two. One part holds where it stood; the other, the broken piece Ajax happened to be sitting on, drops into the sea and takes him with it. It carries him out over the open water, and he drowns.
The undercurrent is in the last line's water — ἀπείρονα κυμαίνοντα, ‘boundless, surging.’ The sea Ajax boasted of beating is the thing that closes over him, and it is given no limit and no calm: it heaves without end. His claim to have escaped the deep is answered by the deep itself, which is simply larger than any man's word about it.
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