Odyssey 5.298 · Book 5, lines 298–300
Odysseus's first words: a cry of despair
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ὀχθήσας δʼ ἄρα εἶπε πρὸς ὃν μεγαλήτορα θυμόν·
Odysseus — ὤ μοι ἐγὼ δειλός, τί νύ μοι μήκιστα γένηται; δείδω μὴ δὴ πάντα θεὰ νημερτέα εἶπεν,
and groaning he spoke to his own great-hearted spirit: “Ah, wretched me, what will become of me now, at the last? I fear the goddess spoke all things truly —”
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The setting
The storm's first great wave has broken over the raft and Odysseus's strength has failed. These are his first spoken words in the poem — a lament to himself. The goddess he recalls is Calypso, who warned he would suffer before reaching home.
A note on this passage
Odysseus finally speaks — and his first words in the whole poem are a cry of despair. Groaning, he talks to his own heart, as Homeric heroes do when alone, and calls himself wretched: what now, at the very end, is to become of him?
The undercurrent is memory. The goddess he means is Calypso, who warned him at parting that he would suffer before he reached home if he left her. On the raft, in the first wave of the storm, that warning arrives as fact. The man the proem called 'much-enduring' enters the poem not enduring but afraid, and the thing he fears most is that the truth was told him and he sailed anyway.
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