Odyssey 5.339 · Book 5, lines 339–340
'Why does Poseidon hound you so?'
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Leucothea — κάμμορε, τίπτε τοι ὧδε Ποσειδάων ἐνοσίχθων ὠδύσατʼ ἐκπάγλως, ὅτι τοι κακὰ πολλὰ φυτεύει;
Poor luckless man, why has Poseidon the earth-shaker raged at you so terribly, that he sows so many evils for you?
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The setting
Seated on the raft in her seabird form, Leucothea opens her speech to Odysseus — half in pity, half in wonder at the sheer scale of the sea-god's anger against him.
A note on this passage
She opens with the exact word for his condition — κάμμορε, 'ill-fated one' — and then asks the question the whole storm poses: why this much? The verb she reaches for is ὠδύσατο, 'grew wroth,' the same root that hums inside Odysseus's own name. She is asking, almost literally, why Poseidon so odysseus-es him.
Her image for it is agricultural: Poseidon φυτεύει, 'plants' or 'sows,' the troubles, as if suffering were a crop the god is deliberately raising. The metaphor makes the persecution patient and purposeful — not a squall that happened to catch him but a harvest of evils cultivated over years. Even the goddess who has come to save him frames his life as something being grown against him.
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