Odyssey 9.421 · Book 9, lines 421–423
Weaving every wile
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εἴ τινʼ ἑταίροισιν θανάτου λύσιν ἠδʼ ἐμοὶ αὐτῷ εὑροίμην· πάντας δὲ δόλους καὶ μῆτιν ὕφαινον ὥς τε περὶ ψυχῆς· μέγα γὰρ κακὸν ἐγγύθεν ἦεν.
if I might find some deliverance from death for my comrades and for myself; and I kept weaving all manner of wiles and cunning, as though for life itself; for a great evil was near at hand.
Word by word
The setting
Trapped in the cave with the blinded but still deadly Cyclops groping at the door, Odysseus casts about for a way to save his men and himself. He weighs plan after plan, because death is very close.
A note on this passage
The plain sense is a man improvising under mortal pressure. Odysseus wants deliverance from death for his crew and for himself, and he spins every trick he can think of, because a great evil stands near. The lines are the hinge between the blinding just done and the escape about to begin.
The undercurrent is one word: μῆτις, the cunning he 'weaves.' It is Odysseus's defining excellence, the improvising intelligence set against the giant's brute force, and the verb ὕφαινον makes that intelligence a craft — cunning spun like cloth. The same faculty has just fooled the Cyclops with the name Nobody; now it must invent the way out the door.
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