Odyssey 5.481 · Book 5, lines 481–485
A wide bed of leaves
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ἀλλήλοισιν ἔφυν ἐπαμοιβαδίς· οὓς ὑπʼ Ὀδυσσεὺς δύσετʼ. ἄφαρ δʼ εὐνὴν ἐπαμήσατο χερσὶ φίλῃσιν εὐρεῖαν· φύλλων γὰρ ἔην χύσις ἤλιθα πολλή, ὅσσον τʼ ἠὲ δύω ἠὲ τρεῖς ἄνδρας ἔρυσθαι ὥρῃ χειμερίῃ, εἰ καὶ μάλα περ χαλεπαίνοι.
They grew into one another, tangled together; and beneath them Odysseus crept. At once he heaped a bed with his own hands, a wide one; for there was a great pile of leaves, exceedingly deep — enough to shelter two or three men in the wintry season, even if it raged very hard.
Word by word
The setting
Cast ashore on Scheria after two days in the surf, Odysseus climbs from the river-mouth to a covert where a wild olive and a garden olive have grown into one tangled thicket. Now, naked and half-dead from the sea, he makes himself a place to sleep.
A note on this passage
The action is simply practical. Odysseus finds two olives grown together into a single thicket, crawls in under them, and rakes up a bed out of the drifted leaves. There is so much fallen leaf-litter that it would cover two or three men against the worst of a winter's cold.
What carries the passage is the hero reduced to first things. The sacker of Troy, the man of countless devices, is here making a nest of dead leaves with his bare hands. Homer measures the shelter not in comfort but in bodies kept warm — a survivor's arithmetic, the same craft that built the raft now spent on a heap of leaves.
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