Odyssey 5.219 · Book 5, lines 219–224
He will endure whatever the sea sends
Read the full text in our reader
ἀλλὰ καὶ ὣς ἐθέλω καὶ ἐέλδομαι ἤματα πάντα οἴκαδέ τʼ ἐλθέμεναι καὶ νόστιμον ἦμαρ ἰδέσθαι. εἰ δʼ αὖ τις ῥαίῃσι θεῶν ἐνὶ οἴνοπι πόντῳ, τλήσομαι ἐν στήθεσσιν ἔχων ταλαπενθέα θυμόν· ἤδη γὰρ μάλα πολλὰ πάθον καὶ πολλὰ μόγησα κύμασι καὶ πολέμῳ· μετὰ καὶ τόδε τοῖσι γενέσθω.
But even so I wish and long every single day to journey home and see the day of return. And if in turn some god should wreck me on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it, keeping in my breast a grief-enduring heart. For already I have suffered much and toiled much on the waves and in war; let this too be added to those.
Word by word
The setting
The turn of the speech: after granting the goddess every advantage, Odysseus states the wish that no immortality can buy. He knows the crossing may destroy him, and answers that prospect with the poem's deepest word — endurance.
A note on this passage
Here is the hero the proem promised. He wants home every single day, and he knows exactly what wanting it may cost: shipwreck on the open sea. His answer is not hope but endurance — 'I will bear it, holding a grief-enduring heart' — backed by a resume of suffering, the war at Troy and the sea after it. One more blow can simply be added to the pile.
The undercurrent is the τλη- root of bearing that hides inside his name and his epithets: this is the man the poem calls 'much-enduring.' Achilles in the Iliad chooses a short bright life; Odysseus chooses to keep going, absorbing whatever comes. His heroism is not a single great deed but the refusal to stop, and he defines it out loud before he has built the raft.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 5.219 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 5.219 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/5.219/