Odyssey 7.278 · Book 7, lines 278–282
The river mouth
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ἔνθα κέ μʼ ἐκβαίνοντα βιήσατο κῦμʼ ἐπὶ χέρσου, πέτρῃς πρὸς μεγάλῃσι βαλὸν καὶ ἀτερπέι χώρῳ· ἀλλʼ ἀναχασσάμενος νῆχον πάλιν, ἧος ἐπῆλθον ἐς ποταμόν, τῇ δή μοι ἐείσατο χῶρος ἄριστος, λεῖος πετράων, καὶ ἐπὶ σκέπας ἦν ἀνέμοιο.
There, as I climbed out, a wave would have crushed me onto the shore, dashing me against the great rocks and onto a cheerless place; but drawing back I swam again, until I came to a river, where the ground seemed to me the best, smooth of rocks, and there was a shelter from the wind.
Word by word
The setting
Swimming toward land, Odysseus meets a deadly rocky coast. He describes how he was nearly killed on the rocks, drew back, and found the one safe landing — the mouth of a river.
A note on this passage
A near miss, then a rescue. A wave would have smashed him on the great rocks as he tried to climb out; he backs off, swims on, and finds the mouth of a river — smooth of stones, sheltered from the wind, the one good landing on a murderous coast.
The quiet point is how narrow survival is. Homer measures the shore by its cruelty: rock, cheerless ground, the surge. Against all of it stands a single calm reach of river, and Odysseus reaches it not by luck alone but by the hard sense to give ground and try again. The poem's survivor is the man who knows when to retreat.
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