Odyssey 5.455 · Book 5, lines 455–457
Breathless and speechless on the sand
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ᾤδεε δὲ χρόα πάντα, θάλασσα δὲ κήκιε πολλὴ ἂν στόμα τε ῥῖνάς θʼ· ὁ δʼ ἄρʼ ἄπνευστος καὶ ἄναυδος κεῖτʼ ὀλιγηπελέων, κάματος δέ μιν αἰνὸς ἵκανεν.
And all his flesh was swollen, and the sea gushed out in plenty up through his mouth and his nostrils; and he, breathless and speechless, lay there faint, and a dread weariness came upon him.
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The setting
Having crawled clear of the water, Odysseus collapses. The poet lingers on the state of his body after two days and nights fighting the sea.
A note on this passage
The physical detail is unsparing: the body swollen with immersion, sea-water pouring back out of mouth and nose, the man unable to breathe or speak. He simply lies there while an exhaustion the poet calls 'dread' settles over him.
Homer does not flinch from what near-drowning does to a body, and the plainness is the point. There is nothing heroic in the posture — no last defiant word, no gesture. The greatness the poem claims for Odysseus is not that he escapes this, but that a man reduced to this will, in a few lines, gather himself and start to think again. Survival here is biological before it is anything else.
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