Odyssey 9.440 · Book 9, lines 440–443
The fool did not perceive
Read the full text in our reader
οὔθατα γὰρ σφαραγεῦντο. ἄναξ δʼ ὀδύνῃσι κακῇσι τειρόμενος πάντων ὀίων ἐπεμαίετο νῶτα ὀρθῶν ἑσταότων· τὸ δὲ νήπιος οὐκ ἐνόησεν, ὥς οἱ ὑπʼ εἰροπόκων ὀίων στέρνοισι δέδεντο.
for their udders were bursting. But the lord, worn by cruel pains, felt along the backs of all the sheep standing upright; but the fool did not perceive this, how, beneath the breasts of the woolly sheep, his men were bound fast.
Word by word
The setting
The ewes are in pain because their udders are full. The blinded Polyphemus, tormented, runs his hands along the backs of the rams as they file out — but never thinks to check underneath, where the men hang bound to their breasts.
A note on this passage
The trap works on the one blind spot the giant has. He checks the animals the only way he now can, by touch, patting the backs as they pass — and the men are underneath. The word νήπιος, 'the fool,' is the narrator's verdict, dropped exactly where the giant's hand stops a few inches short.
The undercurrent is that the blinding has already won. A seeing Cyclops would have glanced down; a blind one can only feel the tops of the fleeces. Odysseus's earlier cunning has narrowed the monster's whole search to the one plane that misses everything. The pathos of the bursting udders and the comedy of the groping hand belong to the same fact: the master of the cave no longer knows what is happening in it.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Odyssey 9.440 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
From the Great Library
You are reading a page of the Odyssey — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Odyssey 9.440 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/odyssey/9.440/