Odyssey 9.61 · Book 9, lines 61–63
Glad, and grieving, the ships pull away
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ὤλονθʼ· οἱ δʼ ἄλλοι φύγομεν θάνατόν τε μόρον τε. ἔνθεν δὲ προτέρω πλέομεν ἀκαχήμενοι ἦτορ, ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο, φίλους ὀλέσαντες ἑταίρους.
They perished; but the rest of us fled death and doom. From there we sailed onward, grieving at heart, glad to be out of death's reach, having lost our dear companions.
Word by word
The setting
Odysseus is telling the Phaeacians his own story. He has just described the raid on the Cicones at Ismarus, which turned to disaster when his men lingered to feast and the Cicones' inland kinsmen counter-attacked at dawn. These lines are the retreat.
A note on this passage
Odysseus closes the Cicone disaster with a count told from the survivors' side: some men died, the rest ran. The ships pull away, but no one is glad in any simple way — they sail 'grieving at heart,' relieved to be alive and already mourning the friends left dead on the beach.
The double note — ἄσμενοι, 'glad,' set beside ἀκαχήμενοι, 'grieving' — is how Homer measures a survivor. Escape is never clean in this poem; every deliverance is also a subtraction. And the loss was avoidable: the men who died did so because they would not leave when Odysseus told them to. This grief is the first instalment of a debt his crew keeps paying.
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