Odyssey 6.223 · Book 6, lines 223–226
He washes the sea from his body
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ὣς ἔφαθʼ, αἱ δʼ ἀπάνευθεν ἴσαν, εἶπον δʼ ἄρα κούρῃ. αὐτὰρ ὁ ἐκ ποταμοῦ χρόα νίζετο δῖος Ὀδυσσεὺς ἅλμην, ἥ οἱ νῶτα καὶ εὐρέας ἄμπεχεν ὤμους, ἐκ κεφαλῆς δʼ ἔσμηχεν ἁλὸς χνόον ἀτρυγέτοιο.
So he spoke, and they went apart and told the girl. But noble Odysseus washed his skin in the river, the brine that clung to his back and broad shoulders, and from his head he scrubbed the scurf of the barren salt sea.
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The setting
The maids go off and report to Nausicaa. Left alone, Odysseus scours the crusted brine of the shipwreck from his skin, back, shoulders, and head.
A note on this passage
The maids obey and go tell Nausicaa; Odysseus, alone at last, sets to washing. The lines are almost clinical about the body: the salt caked on his back and broad shoulders, the crust scoured off his head. The sea is being physically removed from him, handful by handful.
Under the plain grooming is the whole ordeal made touchable. The brine he scrapes away is the residue of the storm that nearly killed him two days before; ἀτρύγετος, the sea's fixed epithet 'barren,' sits on the very salt he is shedding. A castaway is peeling the ocean off his skin so that he can be seen, again, as a man rather than a thing washed ashore.
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