Odyssey 5.341 · Book 5, lines 341–345
'Strip off the clothes and swim for Phaeacia'
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οὐ μὲν δή σε καταφθίσει μάλα περ μενεαίνων. ἀλλὰ μάλʼ ὧδʼ ἔρξαι, δοκέεις δέ μοι οὐκ ἀπινύσσειν· εἵματα ταῦτʼ ἀποδὺς σχεδίην ἀνέμοισι φέρεσθαι κάλλιπʼ, ἀτὰρ χείρεσσι νέων ἐπιμαίεο νόστου γαίης Φαιήκων, ὅθι τοι μοῖρʼ ἐστὶν ἀλύξαι.
He will surely not destroy you, however much he rages. But do just so — and you seem to me not without sense: strip off these clothes and leave the raft for the winds to carry, and with your hands swim, striving toward your return, to the land of the Phaeacians, where it is your lot to slip free.
Word by word
The setting
Leucothea reassures Odysseus that Poseidon cannot in the end kill him, then gives him a hard, specific set of instructions: abandon the raft, shed the heavy clothes Calypso gave him, and swim with his bare hands for the coast of the Phaeacians, where he is fated to survive.
A note on this passage
The goddess turns from comfort to command. First the promise — Poseidon's fury has a limit, and death is not in it — then a plan so precise it is almost a checklist: shed the clothes, quit the raft, swim. The compliment she pays him is exactly the one Odysseus values, that he is not ἀπινύσσων, not a man who has lost his wits.
The hard thing she asks is that he let go of the raft. He has just built it with his own hands, plank by plank, over four days; it is the one made thing between him and the deep. Her instruction is to trust the water and his own arms instead of the craft — and to swim toward νόστος, 'return,' the single word that names everything the whole poem is about.
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