Odyssey 9.131 · Book 9, lines 131–135
What the island could be
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οὐ μὲν γάρ τι κακή γε, φέροι δέ κεν ὥρια πάντα· ἐν μὲν γὰρ λειμῶνες ἁλὸς πολιοῖο παρʼ ὄχθας ὑδρηλοὶ μαλακοί· μάλα κʼ ἄφθιτοι ἄμπελοι εἶεν. ἐν δʼ ἄροσις λείη· μάλα κεν βαθὺ λήιον αἰεὶ εἰς ὥρας ἀμῷεν, ἐπεὶ μάλα πῖαρ ὑπʼ οὖδας.
For it is not poor at all, and it would bear all things in season. For in it are meadows along the shores of the grey sea, well-watered and soft; there the vines would be ever unfailing. In it is level ploughland; a very deep crop one would always reap in season, since the soil beneath is very rich.
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus dwells on the wasted promise of the goat-island. It is no poor soil but rich ground that would repay a settler richly — meadows, vines, deep crops — if only anyone worked it.
A note on this passage
A brief georgic. The island is not poor at all, Odysseus insists, and he itemizes what it would give a settler: soft watered meadows by the shore, vines that would never fail, level ploughland yielding a deep harvest season after season, because the soil beneath is rich. It is a farmer's daydream laid over an empty coast.
The pull of the passage is its mood. Everything stands in the conditional — would bear, would be, would reap — unrealized. Odysseus, aching for his own worked land in Ithaca, looks at fertile ground going to waste and cannot help appraising it. The catalogue of plenty is haunted by the absence of the hand that would gather it.
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