Odyssey 9.109 · Book 9, lines 109–111
The earth that feeds them unasked
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ἀλλὰ τά γʼ ἄσπαρτα καὶ ἀνήροτα πάντα φύονται, πυροὶ καὶ κριθαὶ ἠδʼ ἄμπελοι, αἵ τε φέρουσιν οἶνον ἐριστάφυλον, καί σφιν Διὸς ὄμβρος ἀέξει.
but these things, unsown and unploughed, all grow of themselves — wheat and barley and vines, which bear wine of rich clusters, and for them the rain of Zeus makes it swell.
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The setting
Odysseus describes how the Cyclopes' land yields everything on its own, with no ploughing or sowing.
A note on this passage
Everything grows for the Cyclopes unsown and unploughed — wheat, barley, vines heavy with wine — and the rain of Zeus swells it. The land is effortlessly rich.
This abundance is meant to unsettle. The very detail that sounds like paradise — food without labour — is the poem's proof of savagery. A people who take the earth's gifts without work, without the shared toil and seasons that farming imposes, live below the human line. In the Odyssey, plenty without labour is not blessing but a kind of barbarism.
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