Odyssey 5.394 · Book 5, lines 394–398
As a father recovered — the simile
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ὡς δʼ ὅτʼ ἂν ἀσπάσιος βίοτος παίδεσσι φανήῃ πατρός, ὃς ἐν νούσῳ κεῖται κρατέρʼ ἄλγεα πάσχων, δηρὸν τηκόμενος, στυγερὸς δέ οἱ ἔχραε δαίμων, ἀσπάσιον δʼ ἄρα τόν γε θεοὶ κακότητος ἔλυσαν, ὣς Ὀδυσεῖ ἀσπαστὸν ἐείσατο γαῖα καὶ ὕλη,
As when ever to the children a father's life shows itself welcome — a father who lies in sickness, suffering strong pains, long wasting away, for a hateful god has fallen upon him — and then the gods release him, welcome, from his misery: so welcome to Odysseus did the land and woods appear.
Word by word
The setting
Homer breaks from the action into an extended simile to fix how welcome the sight of land is to the exhausted swimmer.
A note on this passage
A single long simile measures the joy. As children feel when a father who has lain sick a long while, wasting under some god's grudge, is at last given back to health — that much did the sight of land and trees gladden Odysseus. The comparison turns the sea's danger into the sickbed and the sighted coast into recovery.
The image quietly reverses the usual direction of Homeric grief. Elsewhere it is children who are mourned or fathers who mourn; here the children's relief at a father spared becomes the yardstick for a father's own relief at being spared. Odysseus, a father far from the son he has never watched grow, is likened to the very family joy he has been denied.
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