Odyssey 6.310 · Book 6, lines 310–312
Clasp my mother's knees
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τὸν παραμειψάμενος μητρὸς περὶ γούνασι χεῖρας βάλλειν ἡμετέρης, ἵνα νόστιμον ἦμαρ ἴδηαι χαίρων καρπαλίμως, εἰ καὶ μάλα τηλόθεν ἐσσί.
Passing him by, throw your arms about the knees of my mother, so that you may see your day of return, rejoicing, and swiftly, even if you are from very far away.
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The setting
Nausicaa gives the decisive instruction: go past the king and make the suppliant's gesture to Arete — hands to the knees — the formal appeal that binds a host to help.
A note on this passage
This is the heart of her coaching. Pass the king, she says, and take hold of Arete's knees — the fixed posture of supplication, the act that puts a stranger under a household's protection. Do it, and your homecoming is secured, and secured quickly, however far your home may be.
The phrase 'day of return,' nostimon emar, is the poem's own name for the thing Odysseus wants more than anything. Nausicaa hands it to him as a near-certainty, contingent only on one gesture rightly made to one woman. A young girl is teaching the most travelled man alive how to be saved — and she is not wrong. The Odyssey will make Arete's welcome the hinge of his whole stay among the Phaeacians.
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