Odyssey 5.70 · Book 5, lines 70–71

The island's water is as ordered as its fruit. Four springs run side by side with clear, bright water, set near one another but each channelled off in its own direction — a neat, deliberate arrangement, almost garden-like.

The number and the symmetry matter. Four springs, in a row, pointing four separate ways: the detail suggests a place designed, watered on every side, lacking nothing. In the Greek imagination running water is life and blessing, and here it is quadrupled. Homer is still stacking the scales with pleasures — and the very completeness of the place, wanting for nothing, is what makes Odysseus's longing to leave it so telling.

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