Odyssey 5.478 · Book 5, lines 478–480
No wind, no sun, no rain could pierce it
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τοὺς μὲν ἄρʼ οὔτʼ ἀνέμων διάη μένος ὑγρὸν ἀέντων, οὔτε ποτʼ ἠέλιος φαέθων ἀκτῖσιν ἔβαλλεν, οὔτʼ ὄμβρος περάασκε διαμπερές· ὣς ἄρα πυκνοὶ
Through these neither did the force of the wet winds blow, as they blew, nor did the shining sun ever strike them with its rays, nor did the rain pierce right through — so densely they grew.
Word by word
The setting
The poet describes the density of the double olive: a natural roof proof against the elements. The sentence runs on past line 480 into the bed of leaves Odysseus makes.
A note on this passage
A three-part negative seals the shelter: no wind gets through it, no sunlight strikes it, no rain drives inside. The interlaced olives are so thick that none of the three forces of open weather can reach the man beneath them.
After nearly five hundred lines dominated by water and storm — Poseidon's sea, the smashed raft, the killing surf — the poem sets Odysseus down in the one small pocket the weather cannot touch. The wind that has hounded him, the sun that will beat on him tomorrow, the rain: all are named here only to be shut out. It is the first enclosed, protected space he has had since Calypso's cave, and the triple 'neither… nor… nor' builds it like a wall. The line trails off mid-sentence — 'so densely…' — carrying the reader straight on to the bed of leaves he is about to make.
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