Odyssey 5.474 · Book 5, lines 474–477
He chooses the wood and finds two olives
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ὣς ἄρα οἱ φρονέοντι δοάσσατο κέρδιον εἶναι· βῆ ῥʼ ἴμεν εἰς ὕλην· τὴν δὲ σχεδὸν ὕδατος εὗρεν ἐν περιφαινομένῳ· δοιοὺς δʼ ἄρʼ ὑπήλυθε θάμνους, ἐξ ὁμόθεν πεφυῶτας· ὁ μὲν φυλίης, ὁ δʼ ἐλαίης.
So, as he pondered, it seemed to him better to do this; he set out to go to the wood, and found it near the water in an open space, and crept beneath two shoots grown from one spot — the one a wild olive, the other an olive.
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The setting
Odysseus settles the debate in favor of the sheltered wood and moves. He finds a thicket near the water and a natural bower formed by two olive trees grown from one root.
A note on this passage
The deliberation resolves: the wood is the better bet, and he acts on it. Homer follows the decision with quick, concrete steps — up to the trees, finding the copse close to the water in a clearing, crawling in under two shoots that have grown from a single root.
The two olives are worth pausing on. One is φυλίη, the wild olive; one is ἐλαία, the grafted, cultivated tree — and they have grown up intertwined from one place. The pairing of wild and tame, nature and human cultivation grown together into one shelter, is a fitting bower for this hero on this coast: Odysseus is himself the man who belongs to both the wild sea and the settled hall, and Scheria is exactly the halfway house between the monster-world he has left and the human world of Ithaca he is trying to reach.
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