Odyssey 5.31 · Book 5, lines 31–34
Zeus sets the terms: a raft, alone
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Zeus — νόστον Ὀδυσσῆος ταλασίφρονος, ὥς κε νέηται οὔτε θεῶν πομπῇ οὔτε θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων· ἀλλʼ ὅ γʼ ἐπὶ σχεδίης πολυδέσμου πήματα πάσχων ἤματί κʼ εἰκοστῷ Σχερίην ἐρίβωλον ἵκοιτο,
the return of Odysseus, the steadfast one, how he may return — with no escort of gods nor of mortal men; but he, suffering woes on a close-bound raft, would reach fertile Scheria on the twentieth day,
Word by word
The setting
Zeus is instructing Hermes what to tell the nymph Calypso. He has just decreed that Odysseus must go home — and now spells out how: not by any divine or human escort, but on a makeshift raft, to reach the far Phaeacian island of Scheria after twenty days at sea.
A note on this passage
Zeus is still speaking, and here he sets the exact terms of the homecoming. Odysseus gets his return, but stripped of every comfort: no ship of the gods, no crew of men, only a raft he must lash together himself, twenty days of open sea, and a first landfall among strangers on Scheria.
The undercurrent is in one word held over him — ταλασίφρων, ‘patient-hearted.’ The epithet is fixed, but Zeus is about to make it literal: the homecoming is granted precisely as a thing to be endured. What the gods give the hero is not rescue but the bare permission to suffer his way back alone.
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