Odyssey 9.79 · Book 9, lines 79–81
The wrong turn at Cape Malea
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καί νύ κεν ἀσκηθὴς ἱκόμην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν· ἀλλά με κῦμα ῥόος τε περιγνάμπτοντα Μάλειαν καὶ Βορέης ἀπέωσε, παρέπλαγξεν δὲ Κυθήρων.
And now I would have reached my native land unscathed; but the wave and the current, as I rounded Malea, and the North Wind drove me off, and drove me astray past Cythera.
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The setting
Odysseus was almost home. Cape Malea is the last great corner of the Peloponnese before the run north to Ithaca; missing it throws a ship out into the open sea.
A note on this passage
The near-miss that starts everything. Odysseus says it plainly: he had almost made it — 'unscathed' and homeward — when the sea and the North Wind caught him rounding Cape Malea, the last corner before the run up to Ithaca, and shoved him off course past the island of Cythera into open water.
Malea is the hinge of the whole poem. It is a real cape, proverbial among Greek sailors as the point of no return — 'round Malea and forget your home.' Everything strange in Books 9–12, every monster and enchantress, lies on the far side of this one wrong turn. Homer marks the threshold with the counterfactual ἀσκηθὴς ἱκόμην, 'I would have come home safe' — the homecoming held out and snatched back in the same breath.
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