Odyssey 6.170 · Book 6, lines 170–172
Twenty days on the wine-dark sea
Read the full text in our reader
χθιζὸς ἐεικοστῷ φύγον ἤματι οἴνοπα πόντον· τόφρα δέ μʼ αἰεὶ κῦμʼ ἐφόρει κραιπναί τε θύελλαι νήσου ἀπʼ Ὠγυγίης. νῦν δʼ ἐνθάδε κάββαλε δαίμων,
Yesterday, on the twentieth day, I escaped the wine-dark sea; all that while the wave kept bearing me on, and the swift storm-winds, from the island of Ogygia. But now a god has cast me down here,
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus turns from praise to his own plight — the credential that entitles a stranger to ask for help. He has just escaped the open sea after twenty days adrift, storm-driven all the way from Calypso's island, Ogygia, and washed onto this coast by some god.
A note on this passage
The plea becomes a report. He gives the plain facts a host would need: twenty days at sea, escaped only yesterday, carried the whole way by wave and gale from a far island. It is the shipwrecked man's résumé, the standard by which strangers earned welcome in this world.
He names Ogygia but not Calypso, and says a god flung him here without saying which. The vagueness is prudent and also true to him: after so long on the water he genuinely does not know whose hand moved him. What he is careful to convey is only that he is helpless and newly delivered — a man the gods have handled, set down at her feet.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 6.170 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 6.170 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/6.170/