Odyssey 5.368 · Book 5, lines 368–370
Like chaff before the wind
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ὡς δʼ ἄνεμος ζαὴς ἠΐων θημῶνα τινάξῃ καρφαλέων· τὰ μὲν ἄρ τε διεσκέδασʼ ἄλλυδις ἄλλῃ· ὣς τῆς δούρατα μακρὰ διεσκέδασʼ. αὐτὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς
And as a strong-blowing wind tosses a heap of dry chaff and scatters it this way and that, so the wave scattered the long beams of that raft. But Odysseus
Word by word
The setting
The great wave from Poseidon strikes the raft. Homer stops the action to compare the blow to a familiar sight from the threshing-floor before showing its result.
A note on this passage
A single Homeric simile carries the whole destruction. The raft's stout timbers — beams Odysseus felled, trimmed, and pegged with his own hands over four days of work — come apart as easily as dry husks blown off a threshing-floor. The comparison is drawn from ordinary farm labor, and its very ordinariness measures how little the sea cares for his craft.
The undercurrent is the reversal of scale. Homeric similes often lift a heroic act toward the grandeur of nature; this one shrinks a man's best work down to chaff. The same verb, scatters, does the wind's light work and the wave's ruinous one, and the repetition (διεσκέδασ' … διεσκέδασ') is the hinge the whole picture turns on: what is play for the wind is catastrophe for the man.
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